Well, there you are, soul under arm, the smell of freshly baked egg salad in the air, realizing that the fragility of life is not only revealed in the great moments of illness and death or in the heartbreaking scenes of human tragedy that force themselves upon you as you doomscroll through your screen, but precisely in those banal moments when you can do nothing but wait in line at the gas station, your thoughts like a flock of starlings fluttering nervously along the frayed edges of your consciousness because you only wanted to fill up half a tank because the gas prices are ridiculously high again and you have somehow come to terms with the fact that you cannot control everything except the uncontrollable craving for an egg sandwich that you suddenly had, just like that, as if your subconscious was signaling you to pause for a moment and consider that your body and your mind together form a fragile fortress that adapts to the vagaries of evolution, just as organisms once did the step moving from water to land, from fins to legs, from invertebrate to vertebra, from cell clump to consciousness, each transition accompanied by breaking points and vulnerabilities and an uncomfortable unsteadiness that we still carry within us, because even in a gas station, surrounded by gleaming shelves of candy and energy drinks that are a caricature of the primal instincts that once drove our ancestors to survive on the savannah, you come face to face with the fragility of your existence.