There on the corner of hunt road was where I first encountered this homeless man with a smile, carrying a very artsy board articulating his personal struggle. I cannot remember anything else about that day: where I was going or what I was wearing or who I was with. I do not even remember the day itself, instead he comes to me like a misleadingly wrapped gift. I do, however, remember looking at him and wondering why he was smiling. Why was this homeless man smiling? What was there for him to smile about? I must have seen this man many times, and the same thought occurred to me over and over again.
And then I moved out of that area and did not see him for a long time, maybe a year or two. When I saw him again my circumstances had changed. For the first time in my life I had a car, and just enough money to be trapped in needing wants. I was somewhere in the middle of a murder of automobiles, a red dot in the not to near distance signalling all the time I felt I wasting. The car in front of me was hooting and the driver was screaming some profanity. I saw him and his artsy board then, and I felt so many things, I felt so many things at this inappropriate time. He looked the same as he had when I had first seen him a few years earlier: Happy. In that moment it was like everything else had stayed the same and I was only thing that had changed. The situation was the painting and I was the painter. I remember how foolish the man in the car in front of me now seemed, and how foolish I actually was. I looked at the homeless man and I saw all the things I didn’t have, and all the things I had, all things I wanted so badly. All the things that I worried about seemed unimportant, shallow, irrelevant. Here I was in my car, on my way from university to my flat worrying about my university marks, and the man who didn’t love me back, and the man I didn’t love back, and why I was such a crappy mother. I looked at him and I wondered why I wasn’t smiling.
I always give homeless people money, I like to think that I do it because I want to help them, help the world. But think I actually do it to validate and perpetuate my consuming delusion that I can change the world. One day as I opened the window to give a homeless child money for the hundredth time, my cousin said to me “you can’t save the world”. I am generally sensitive but on this day, that comment was a knife through my heart, it brought me gut-wrenching disappointment. I am now learning that loving this world without trying to fix it is a much more fulfilling and conscious (and probably considerably more difficult) endeavor.
I have looked for that man every time I am at that robot, which is almost every day and I have not seen him. If I am honest with myself, this bothers me deeply. How is it that I never got the chance to tell him how incredibly profound he was.
*This is the first short story I’ve written, its been quite the task getting myself believe in my talent enough to try new things so I’m pretty excited. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.