This essay was originally written in July 2016.
He lives in stoplight increments.
Wanders up and down the cement strip separating the comers and goers, the speeders and idlers. His home is the chipped yellow-painted island, a 2-by-20 landmass, and he is stranded.
Not lost; no, never lost, however. He stakes his territory expertly, with months, perhaps years, perhaps a hard-knock lifetime of unfortunate training to meander up and down, up and down. His smoke signals, attempts to get off this goddamn median and into some shelter–a home for the body and for the heart–those attempts come in squares, rectangles, scraps. Ratty cardboard; the back of a sign boasting “Massage! $60/hr” (as if he could even dream of such a luxury) that he stole from a nearby grassy divider; the inside of a deconstructed box–all those lifeline signals are literal signs imploring the good people to throw him a lifesaver in the ocean of traffic surrounding him. SOS. Anything will help.
Day after day, the regulars at that particular stoplight see him, but they never look. Never make eye contact, for that would mean acknowledging their divide. The suits, the soccer moms, the teens, in their cooled, leathered, impeccable cars–contrasted with him, beaten down by sun and circumstance.
Two worlds too painful to intersect.
“Oh I just don’t have the time or spare change or the light’s about to turn green or my boss will kill me and I’m already late or or or…” A slew of excuses, and each one more successful than the last in mollifying the regulars to continue to awkwardly ignore, ignore ignore.
What might they see, though, if they lifted their eyes from their screens or the well-studied curvatures of their steering wheel? If their gaze actually met his, and noticed an expression not too unfamiliar to their own? Would they feel alarm that his eyes reveal past friends and lovers treasured and lost, a knowledge of some sort of family unit, whether by blood or not, and a basic need to be recognized as a person? Would they feel a nagging and gnawing discomfort, a mental incongruence, that his soul-windows radiate an understanding of emotional pain, that much amplified by his situation–yet so tangibly recognizable if they just allow themselves to be vulnerable and admit that they, too, hurt? Would they?
There’s hope that they would. Some do. During certain cycles of green-yellow-RED, spare change clinks into his grateful hand. Eye-to-eye, and hand-to-hand, an ephemeral bond is made.
The meek, brown-haired girl, still in high school and reeling from her first breakup, sees something in the way his hair seems to have a mind of its own, long strands willfully defying the laws of gravity. Her ex, too, had a similar shag. Before reason catches up with emotion, she grabs the few coins in her console and shoves it into the stranger on the median’s hand, trying to drown the memory of her past.
The hardened executive, on the road to an early death by overworking, swallows hard as the face standing a few feet away contorts much in the same way as his son’s did when he was about to ask for a favor or money. Yesterday would’ve been his only child’s first day of college, had he not been T-boned by a drunk driver two summers ago.
The darling grandmother, now having acquired the financial stability and grandchildren she’d always wanted, remembers how she, too, grew up with nothing. His dejected eyes and eyebrows raised in hopelessness and mercy shoot pangs through her body as she recalls begging for food on the streets during the war.
It’s the rare, fleeting moments like these, the transfer of human warmth through metaphors and money, that constitute his saving grace. For the substantial sea of upper-middle class suburban faces that lack the guts to acknowledge a fellow human being, individuals marred by their own grief understand. Eye-to-eye, and hand-to-hand, they throw him a lifesaver, and he clings onto life on his island just a little bit longer.