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Together
He was staggering toward me, using the wall of an old building to keep himself upright. I noticed his hands, gripping the wall of red brick. He looked at me through his half-closing eyes as he lost balance and caught himself before nearly falling. I tried to hide inside, as a life full of pain, unbridled, barreled half-conscious, intoxicated, toward me. These many faces come into our line of sight, carrying with them the hidden and not so hidden worlds of their bodies. He said, with a million silent cries, "I am hurting and lost." Like a growing crack on the ice, his inaudible hurt splintered like fingers toward me. We almost brushed shoulders as he stopped, with a half-shocked look on his, as he became incontinent and wet himself in front of me. He must have been trying, as hurried as he could, to pull himself to a wall, to pee, not intending to meet me on his way.
I pushed past him with contempt, but now in retrospect, I am realizing it was fear I was feeling, not contempt. I wondered did he mean to do it in front of me? How dare he. How pitiful. I looked down at the sidewalk, averting my gaze, and pressed through the wall of his disoriented energy, like sparks flying from a live wire. We, for a moment, undeniably mixed into one another. The one lost, and the one watching. I got in my car, circled around the block trying to skirt the provoked feelings, and came to the next street corner, where I saw the same man, hiding in an alleyway, looking down at his hands fumbling to tie a jacket around the wet stain soaking through the denim of his jeans. Struck like a tuning fork, I saw him, not as the rude broken man, but the sad man. Compassion flooded me like adrenaline does, swelling the heart with more blood. Even in his stupor, he felt shame. No brew is strong enough to blunt the pain of humiliation. There is no running from ourselves, no matter how many things we take to try to dull our pain.
We blend and bend into one another. There are no lines and boundaries to our bodies, though we think there are. We are energy, atoms, and molecules floating on a moat downstream. I sensed his frequency and he felt mine, and together we told a story. Neither of us was fully aware of what was said, but something was exchanged regardless. Maybe my witnessing him would break the tie between him and the substances he was using. Perhaps that moment would crack open some awareness in him and prevent him from sliding further downhill. Or maybe it was the force that pushed him even further from himself. I will never know what happened to him.
He will never know that I cried in my car, in a dark parking lot, thinking of him against the red brick wall. Seeing my judgment and unkindness mixed with his pain. I know this story, the long line of this tale. The blending and the pulling apart. The seeing and pretending we are not. I have been both the watcher and the one running. I have been the man against the red brick wall and the fearful onlooker. I have been the judgment and the tears of understanding. I have been the withholder of love and protector of my energy, in the name of saving myself. I am part of the story of human evolution. The strange crooked thing, working slowly to iron itself out. I hope. I see how much we hurt and do not know how to hold that hurt. I see our hands fumbling to tie the coat around our waist to hide the stains of pain. I am him, and he is me.
Where do you go from here, dear one? Inextricably linked, what story do we now choose to write? Do we keep walking, looking down at the sidewalk as we brush shoulders with each other’s worlds? Or do we let ourselves feel, really feel the story being written between souls? As poet David Whyte says, “ the courageous conversation is the one you do not want to have… Be brave enough to start the conversation that matters.”
