Crossing the Street
I was on my way to get some food for my daughter at the Budapest train station. The day was winding down, the light was red, and I was standing at the crosswalk waiting like everyone else. The kind of moment that vanishes into the blur of travel—unremarkable, almost mechanical.
He stumbled into the street from the side, drunk in the way that gravity starts to look like a suggestion. Cars were coming—fast enough to matter. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t hesitate. He walked right into the flow of traffic like someone who had long since stopped negotiating with the world.
And then, without a word, he raised a big white cross hanging around his neck.
Held it up—not waving, not pleading. Just holding it forward, between himself and the oncoming cars.
It was surreal. There he was: unsteady, exposed, and yet completely calm. As if the cross itself were a shield. As if that one gesture would interrupt the laws of physics, of probability, of survival.
And in a way—it did.
The cars slowed. The drivers honked, sure, but no one hit him. He passed through. A man out of sync with everything, who still managed to move forward without harm.
It was funny. It was tragic. It was beautiful.
Because in that moment, I saw something I recognized. Not just absurd faith, or drunken courage—but the deep, strange human habit of believing that something will carry us. A symbol, a gesture, a piece of meaning we clutch to our chest and hold up when nothing else makes sense.
He was crossing the street. But also—he was crossing something else.
A line between order and chaos. Between structure and surrender. Between what protects us and what just feels like it might.
We all have our version of that cross.
We step into roads we maybe shouldn’t.
And somehow—more often than we deserve—we reach the other side.
What carries you across?