Stephen Mejias

This morning, I walked right by electrician and idiosyncratic amplifier designer, Nori Komuro, and I didn’t say a word. Not even hello. Why didn’t I say anything? I don’t know. I had just emerged from the subway, and was walking up 32nd Street, toward Herald Square, and I wasn’t expecting to see an idiosyncratic amplifier designer. I was looking, instead and as usual, at the ground, at the sky, at high-heels and at skirts. I saw plenty of those. I was pulling a small handcart carrying a box of loudspeakers. Nori Komuro and I would have had something to talk about.

“Oh, loudspeakers,” Nori Komuro might have said.

“Yes,” I could have said. “I just wrote about these for our November issue. They’re the Boston Acoustics A 25. They’re awesome!”

“Really?!”

“Totally. Made any amps lately?”

But I didn’t say anything.

And I know for certain that it was Nori Komuro. He was wearing his usual reddish t-shirt, his usual bluish jeans, his usual grayish sneakers, his usual smile.

I saw him.

You know how it is when you run into a coworker at the supermarket or a professor at a bar or a stripper at church? It’s almost like you don’t recognize that person outside of the familiar, ordinary context. That’s how it was when I walked right by Nori Komuro, idiosyncratic amplifier designer, on 32nd Street, near Herald Square. What was he doing there?!

I saw him. Recognized him, but didn’t recognize him. My mind searched for answers. I walked right by him. I put my head down, turned halfway back, and whispered to no one: “That was Nori Komuro. I should have said hi to him.”

Not saying hi to Nori Komuro defined the rest of my walk to work. I shook my head all the way to the office.

Time passed and I forgot about it for awhile and now it’s 8:13pm and I’m writing about it. I wonder how my day would have been different had I said hello to Nori Komuro. It’s possible that this blog entry would have been better.