I woke up one morning to my sheets sticky with sweat and thick rays of sunshine flashing through the beige shades of my bedroom window. As I wished for more rest, I fixated on the bright blue flowers adorning my crinkled sheets. A praying mantis croaked outside my bedroom window as I rose to open the blinds to fully let the morning light stream in. I slid the shades open to reveal a gravel road that propelled dust into the air with every passing vehicle. A blue pickup truck was parked in the center of the street and its cargo bed was stocked with black plastic bins of produce. Leaning up against the truck was the farmer who owned it. He had a reddish tan and calloused hands. The farmer held a bright red megaphone to his lips and screamed about his stock, “Watermelon! Oranges! Lemons! Juicy red tomatoes!” I knew that the megaphone served to gather the elderly women of the Rhodian village so that they could purchase their weekly fruit. I could already imagine the ladies rushing out of the houses with the large porches, white and peeling paint jobs, and grapevines that grew along the side of the homes. The women would all congregate in front of my house to meet the man and his blue truck’s contents.
I looked away from my window and began to wonder why I had woken up this early. Was it the hissing of the praying mantis? Or the booming voice of the farmer amplified by the megaphone?
Soon I noticed the heavy breathing outside my door and could imagine my grandfather leaning against the oak. After he knocked again and shook the key in the lock, I realized that he had been trying to get me up. He was late to play backgammon at the cafe and bet for a coffee, and I was to blame.
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I never understood why people gambled—bet thousands of dollars on a single casino game. When I played poker for the first time, I concluded that it comes down to the thrill of it all. Some card games could be boring as hell but once there’s money on the table each movement, each glance, each leg bouncing up and down, each hand raised slightly in anticipation matters. I never understood the lottery either. I have a friend whose family sends him every week to pick up the lotto from the grocery store. I figure they’d probably be better off pocketing the change than holding their breaths when the winning numbers flash across their televisions. It may just be something to do on a Monday night for my friend’s family, but for the people I’ve seen in my grandmother’s neighborhood in the Bronx waiting in lines at bodegas just hoping to get the winning ticket, it’s more. Those people are buying into the idea that a single slip of paper, a single moment, a single transaction could change their entire lives forever.
I think that is true for all humans, no matter the financial circumstance. We buy into this idea that a single moment can change our lives for the better. We want to win the lotto, or score that high-paying job by nailing that interview, or meet someone by chance at the bar and fall in love. But sometimes we forget that those life-changing moments aren’t entirely in our control and we are at the mercy of chance. What if the single moment doesn’t result in good, but tragedy? Rather than be swept in a whirlwind romance, we might be hit by a truck.
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As my grandfather huffed at my inability to get out of bed at a reasonable hour from beyond my locked door, I thought about the previous night. I had been out with my friends until late—ordering milkshakes at the cafe, playing pool at another, running around in the sand of the beach. Together we made up an unassuming bunch. Three brunettes with frizzy or wavy hair depending on the humidity and another with beautiful ringlet curls if she took care of them and a tangled mess if she didn’t. We always were half dressed, to our grandmother’s dismay, because technically in this town we were always at the beach. When we were dressed, we dressed for comfort. We needed versatile clothing to ride bikes around the bay or climb trees with our awkward and bony limbs.
This summer was different though. We had added a new one to the bunch. Her name was Freya and she was a British tourist vacationing on our island. Freya was taller than all of us even though she was the youngest. She had straw-blonde hair, and she liked to wear floral skirts and patterned dresses. She liked my cousin Alexandra best because Alex made her laugh. She liked me second best because I wasn’t a “bore.” I was secretly hurt that she liked Alexandra better than me because people often did. Alexandra’s smile was infectious, her dimple adorable, and her supply of jokes never ran its course. Sometimes I’d see Freya bounding up the spiral staircase of our three-story house, hoping she’d stop at the second floor. She’d always go up to the third to see Alexandra. Still, all five of us would spend most of our days together at the beach during the day and hanging around on the boardwalk’s shops in the evenings and nights.
Today marked the first day that I wasn’t going to hang out with Freya and the girls.
I slowly got up and turned the lock to my door. There was my grandfather with his crooked teeth and tan complexion towering above me.
“You are coming?” he said in his heavy Greek accent.
I nodded.
“Well then, hurry up!”
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In calculus, we are learning about differential equations. We read an article about how non-pharmaceutical interventions could contain the spread of coronavirus and thus the number of people affected. Changing the differential equation by just one parameter, like contact restrictions or early isolation and detection of cases, could change the course of the virus spread in a particular area, or even the entire world. Just changing the date travel restrictions were lifted by one week in China changed the model curve so starkly. These sorts of predictions make us think that everything is predictable and definite, that if we create equations like these and plug in the different parameters, we can accurately predict things like the spread of infectious diseases and prevention measures to curb the spread. But in reality, there are things that even the intersection between math and science can’t account for. What the main takeaway from these equations and the recommendations that result from them can teach us is that each and every measure taken or variable changed matters. Every random variable thrown in can skew the entire model, and everything changed in a real-life situation can alter the course of history forever.
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My grandmother was always annoyed that my grandfather took the car to the city almost every day. She’d be stuck at home tending to all her grandchildren and her chores while he’d be off not giving a damn about the mess he left in the fridge or the cabinet she wanted him to fix. She let him go, though, mainly because most times she would rather have him out of the house and out of her hair than helping with her responsibilities. The night before my grandfather had asked if I wanted to come with him. He said that he’d drop me off at the toy store or Zara while he played a round at a cafe. I said yes, but only if my cousin Alexandra would come too. In the summers my cousin and I were inseparable except for the days we pissed each other off. Sometimes Alexandra would protest my bossiness and bound down the spiral stairs in a huff, not even batting an eye towards me on her way down. Other days I’d grow annoyed by her constant jokes and her inability to take anything seriously, and I would tattle and tell my grandmother that she was acting like a baby. That day though, on that trip to the city, we were best friends again, just by chance.
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The people in our lives are another example of how a single moment, action, or even smile, can change everything. Sometimes I dwell on the fact that the people in my life could have been total strangers if everything hadn’t lined up right. How many things had to fall into place for me to attend the school I do, or to meet the people I am friends with, for my parents to be my parents, to even be myself at all? How many things had to line up for me even to exist? Or this planet to exist? Sometimes I think about the fact that the odds of me being alive right now are basically zero and it astounds me that I’m here.
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Alexandra was happy to join me on my trip to the city. After all, we had only been a few times that summer. We strapped on our leather sandals, and our grandmother braided our hair into two thick French braids each. My grandfather waited impatiently in his car outside the house yelling at us to stop worrying about our hair and get in the damn car.
We finally opened the back door of our house and stepped outside hurriedly, trying not to let out the cold air that was now blasting out of the AC. We got in the back of my grandfather’s car begrudgingly, as it had been left in the sun too long and our skin singed upon entering the makeshift furnace. The car’s upholstery was peeling enough to reveal the sticky yellow foam underneath its leather. The old BMW guzzled gas at the pace that our family grabbed up sizzling french fries from the stove. It was sweltering in the car the whole hour drive because my grandfather refuses to turn the AC on no matter the temperature. He claims it makes his asthma worse. The roads on our island are winding and steep, which always makes me feel sick after a long car ride. Even as I opened my car door and said goodbye to my grandfather, who was headed to the cafe, I still felt queasy. But in actuality none of the tiny details about this day matter. Not the summer breeze in my hair or the pace of my sluggish walk or the cute top I found in the store. Not the woman asleep on the sidewalk with a baby in her arms and a cup for spare change by her feet. Not the smell of the pastries wafting from a bakery. It's what happened the second we said yes to going with my grandfather on that car ride. One “yes” that changed everything.
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I once had a friend who droned on and on about how nothing mattered. About how even he did not matter. Eventually, he would die and his parents would too and this whole earth would combust into flames at some point and so on. So in actuality, it didn’t matter if he just killed himself then and there. It’s hard to reason with someone with that line of thinking. I’d come up with question after question and answer after answer to try to refute his claims that his life didn’t matter. You matter to your parents! You matter to your friends! Even a small action or sentence spoken can have tremendous effects on the world around you! I’d exclaim.
He’d respond every time with, “Nothing matters in the long term. Everything is gonna die eventually.”
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On a winter’s day in 1961, a meteorologist by the name of Edward Lorenz had been sitting by his computer, trying to predict the weather a month later by simulating weather patterns. Up until that point, the world seemed very predictable to Lorenz. Isaac Newton’s laws had predicted every moving object's path and it seemed like science had figured it all out. Newtonian determinism meant that you could plug a number into one of Newton’s equations and predict a moving object’s path.
Lorenz had been using differential equations with twelve variables such as wind speed and temperatures. He was buying into the Newtonian determinism ideals. Lorenz wanted to see the sequence again and decided he would take the numbers on the computer’s printout and start the simulation during the middle of its course instead of typing in the equations and the correct values from the start. The numbers on the printout were rounded so insignificantly that Lorenz figured it would affect the weather like a small gust of wind, basically not affecting the end weather pattern at all. Lorenz left his computer running while going on a coffee break. When he came back to his computer an hour later, he was astonished. His model had rapidly and completely changed. The two simulations shared almost no resemblance to each other. After some time he found the culprit behind the great difference in the model: the rounding mistake the computer had made. The mistake was so minuscule, so tiny, that at that time no scientists would have thought it would have made such a difference to the model. Lorenz was at no fault in making those assumptions as this was common knowledge.
A coffee break, a lazy meteorologist, and a computer that rounded changed science forever. From his discovery, it was clear that small changes in initial conditions could produce large outcomes in the long term. It also showed that atmospheric modeling could not accurately predict weather conditions in the long term. These findings were labeled the chaos theory and later connected to what is known popularly as the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect states that potentially a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could cause a catastrophic tornado in Texas. Essentially, small details could cause large consequences or changes.
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After a long day of shopping and sweaty car rides, Alexandra and I returned to our home by the beach. We stripped ourselves of our sweaty clothes and pulled out our braids and let our hair loose. Most days, the twins and Freya would join us in the afternoon at the beach until the sunset ensued. We would then watch the colors of purple and pink light up the sky and the ocean beneath it from the comfort of the sand. We would retreat to our houses once the sky grew cold and lifeless, only to reemerge outside freshly showered minutes later. This was our routine.
That day when we reached our open umbrella, the twins were there to greet us. Freya was missing. A glitch in the normalcy. We didn’t know where she was. We went about our time on the beach, thinking she was probably off doing some tours around the island with her father or visiting a nearby beach. A few hours later, our neighbor came to the shade of our umbrella to speak to my grandmother. I remember her wearing a black one-piece bikini and a scarf around her head and how she was looking down when she spoke to my grandmother. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A couple of minutes later my grandmother waved us over.
“There’s been an accident,” my grandmother solemnly muttered, scanning our faces and searching for a way to break the news. She was standing up, her feet in the hot sand instead of resting on her beach chair.
“What?” I asked. We all looked around at each other, worried now.
“A car accident.” My grandmother continued, explaining what she knew. Our neighbor had been putting up her laundry to dry on her balcony when a man from the village called out to her with the news. The story had been traveling by word of mouth throughout the village with a waterfall's intensity. Around noon, two tourists, a girl and her father, had gone to refill gas at the nearby station. On their way out a big white truck slammed into the side that the girl was sitting in.
“It was Freya,” my grandmother said. Even before her mouth opened to say it, I think I already knew. Our neighbor slowly retreated to her house and my grandmother sent us to go light candles at the monastery. With a couple of euros in hand, we walked the boardwalk with solemn faces. I remember giggling and shivering with the girls out of shock as we walked, for none of us knew what to say.
When we got to the little church, I dropped some change in the coin slot and picked up a candle. I looked at all the faces of the saints and the icons and went up and kissed them after doing my cross. I lit my candle and stuck it in the sand, praying for Freya although I wasn’t sure if praying would be any use. I wasn’t alone in that church but it felt like it. It was so quiet, quiet enough to hear my own heavy breathing and the blood rushing in my ears as I muttered, “Please god. Please let her be okay.”
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In one of my favorite movies Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time with a Delorean car to the 1950s after an experiment with an eccentric scientist Doc Brown goes wrong. He accidentally screws up the timeline of his own life in the process when he gets hit by a car and his mother saves him, falling in love with him instead of his father who would have otherwise been hit with the car. Marty tries to restore the timeline through the course of the movie by getting his parents to meet so that he will exist in the future. He succeeds in that, but even little things he does dramatically change the course of events in his life. For example, because he teaches his father to stick up for himself in his youth, his life is drastically better once he gets back to the future. Movies like this toy with the concept of the butterfly effect: little actions and choices could have drastic effects on the future.
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The next day, my mother went to check on Freya and her father in the hospital. She didn’t want me to join her even though I begged. I waited for her by the window of my bedroom. Every car that passed by the quiet street was either my mom with more news or Freya herself, ready to play with us again. She would laugh at one of Alexandra’s silly jokes and her blonde hair would glimmer gold in the sun. We’d go out for milkshakes and play in the sand at night.
Soon enough, my mother came back to Haraki. As soon as she stepped through the door I bombarded her with questions. The main thing I wanted to know she didn’t have the answer to. “Is Freya going to be okay?”
Freya hadn’t been in the hospital when my mother visited. Her father was in the emergency room in Rhodes with some bones broken, but he was going to be okay. Freya, on the other hand, had been flown by helicopter to Athens where they’d have a better chance at saving her. She was in critical condition. Her airbag had hit her head and damaged her brain. Later I would find out that she was transferred to a London hospital after a few weeks in Athens. She became paralyzed down one side of her body and would never regain control of its movement.
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Before Freya’s accident, I felt my summers in Haraki were untouchable. Every year Haraki would be there for me, unchanged and comforting. My grandmother would be there if I would wake up in the night from the dogs barking or in the early morning from the roosters' crows. The swaying trees would be left exactly where I left them and the church’s roof would never crumble. The lights that illuminated the castle would never falter or diminish. The fireworks across the bay would go off when there was a wedding. The savory sauce from the restaurant would always have the same tangy flavor and starchy ingredients. While my life was turbulent and malleable in New York, my life in Greece was simple and routine. But Freya’s accident made me realize that Haraki would change with time, and so would I. I would no longer be the carefree child of the beach. No longer free to float on my back in the sea or to taste the salt in my hair. I would grow older and time complicates life.
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A few months after the accident, my grandmother told me that Freya had come looking to play with Alexandra and me on that day in August. She had wanted to play with us, cards maybe, but we had gone to the city. Since we weren’t around she had decided to go to the gas station with her father.
Things could have been different. I could have said no to the delight of shopping, or decided to go another day. My grandmother could have begged her husband to stay home and help. My cousin could have stayed behind. Freya’s father could have filled up the tank the night before. The truck driver could have paid more attention.
I’ve spoken to Freya a few times in the years since, check-ins to see how she is and nothing more. I only know bits and fragments about what her life is like now. She’s not the same. How can she be? She used to be so carefree, so full of light. I can’t help but think that if I had made a different decision about going with my grandfather that day, this didn’t need to happen. That if I had just gone the day before or the day after or no day at all, Freya would have had a normal summer. A normal life. She wouldn’t have had to be in the hospital for months, she wouldn't have been in so much pain. She wouldn’t have had to be fed and clothed and bathed before she regained control of half of her body. People wouldn’t have bullied her for her disability. She wouldn’t have tried to commit suicide because of it. She wouldn’t have to live paralyzed for the rest of her life.
In the end, Freya came in and out of my life passively and at full tilt. She was a new parameter to the equation that was my summers. She came onto the island and shook everything up, but left without a trace. For a long time I grappled with the guilt of her accident. But in the end, after the guilt subsided with the years, the incident affected my life very little. Freya hadn’t been in my life before that summer and she wasn’t going to be in my life after it. I used to think that I was in control and that my decisions would only affect myself. But after Freya, I realized how feeble my hold on life was. I am entirely at the mercy of other parameters, other influences, and so are the people around me. It astounds me to think that a single decision of mine could affect someone else’s entire life entirely.
Sources
Alan Chodos, ed., “This Month in Physics History.” American Physical Society, January 2003,
www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200301/history.cfm#:~:text=Lorenz%20subsequently%20dubbed%20his%20discovery,range%20weather%20forecasting%20was%20doomed.
Lai, Shengjie, et al. “Effect of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions to Contain COVID-19 in China.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 4 May 2020,
www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2293-x fbclid=IwAR2dya0pmbsHmo2Awftr1EGE9aqiucveRhtDQL8Wogx_aaFeKa2UzCwa4Xo.