I was parked on a dark side street in Revere, three of us in the car, when the front door of a house we didn’t know swung open and people started spilling out.
Six of them. Three of us.
One guy had an empty vodka handle. A pregnant girl was holding a fireplace poker.
Somewhere in that crowd was a knife I hadn’t seen yet.
It was warm out, so the car was off and the windows were down. They were power windows, which meant I would’ve had to start the car and then put them up. With six people already coming at us, I figured I’d be dead before the engine caught up with my foot. So we didn’t run. We fought.
By the time it was over, I had a hundred and twenty stitches in my side, my thigh, my ankle. The doctor who put them in told me if that poker had landed an inch lower, I wouldn’t have been in his chair.
I was seventeen.
Here’s the part that still gets me, all these years later. I couldn’t tell you the guy’s last name. I barely remember his face. What I remember is the story I built about him, all summer long, out of almost nothing.
It started with a girl at an ice cream stand. I didn’t know she had a boyfriend. He was the boyfriend I didn’t know about. We got into it, it got broken up, and that should have been the end of it.
Instead it became a feud. All summer, run-ins. A dirty look here. Somebody telling somebody he’d said something. A shouting match in a parking lot that didn’t go anywhere. Nothing that actually happened would have justified what came next. But by the time we spotted him that night on the way back from a liquor store run, I wasn’t looking at a kid I’d crossed paths with a few times. I was looking at an enemy I’d spent three months building.
We jumped out ready to settle it. Cops rolled by, we backed off, drove a few streets over, and got out again to finish what I was sure needed finishing. Except we’d stopped outside his friend’s house without knowing it. That’s when the door opened.
I think about that whole summer a lot different now than I did at seventeen. At the time, I would have told you the guy had it out for me. That he was looking for a reason. That every time our paths crossed, it meant something.
What I actually knew was a lot thinner than that. A girl I liked had a boyfriend I didn’t know about. We fought once. After that, most of what I “knew” about him came from other people’s retellings and my own imagination filling in the rest. Every version got a little worse. By August I was fighting a story, not a person.
There’s an old idea called Occam’s Razor. People usually get it wrong and think it means the simplest explanation is always true. What it actually means is don’t add assumptions you don’t need. If a friend doesn’t text you back for six hours, all you actually know is they haven’t answered yet. Angry, busy, phone died, doesn’t care, that’s all stuff your brain added for free.
There’s a second one, Hanlon’s Razor, that goes further. Don’t assume malice when something dumber explains it just as well. Distraction. Bad timing. A kid who’s just as unsure of himself as you are. Most of what we read as an attack is somebody being ordinary and human in a way that just happens to piss you off.
Maybe there’s a third one hiding inside those two. Don’t suffer from information you don’t have. I spent three months suffering over a kid who probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in between run-ins.
I didn’t know any of these ideas at seventeen. What I knew was a feeling in my chest every time I thought about that kid, and I trusted the feeling more than I trusted the facts, because I didn’t have any facts. Just a season of guesses I kept feeding all summer, each one a little more certain than the last.
You do a smaller version of this every week. The boss’s short email. The friend who goes quiet. A look across a room you didn’t ask for. None of it as loud as a fireplace poker, but the same shit’s going on underneath.
And guess what? The story doesn’t stay in your head. It has a habit of compounding too. Every retelling to a friend, every dirty look you catch out of the corner of your eye, gets folded back into the narrative and comes out more solid than it went in. By the time you act on it, it doesn’t feel like a guess anymore. It just feels like something you know.
That doesn’t mean that everyone’s innocent. Some people really are what you think they are and once you’ve seen the pattern a few times, you’re not being paranoid anymore, you’re paying attention. The two razors aren’t a reason to assume the best about everybody no matter what. They’re a reason to slow down before you decide, especially when all you have is a feeling and a story you’ve been building up since June.
I still think about that inch. Not the pregnant girl who swung the poker. I don’t even remember her face anymore. Just the summer before it, and how much of it I spent building a war out of a girl who didn’t tell me she had a boyfriend, and a kid I never once actually talked to.
If this brought up a story you’ve been building from half the facts, hit reply and tell me what it is. I read them all.