The Quiet Broken

You wonder how some people live. Just what is the nature of the battle they are fighting? How do they maintain at least a draw every day? You can find some compassion for them, but how is there to be sympathy or empathy without understanding? I begin to think with some people that I have some idea about them, but I'm probably wrong. Other people I'm smart enough to know that I can't even begin to hazard a guess about their nature.

There's not enough information about some people. There are just moments. There was this man I heard out on the street the other night. It was one of those moments where I knew I'm really not like other people. Somehow it occurred to me that nobody else I know would have gone outside to walk around the block after two in the morning after dropping something off in the building's outgoing mail slot. It follows, therefore, that nobody else I know would have been there to hear this man screaming and cursing.

He was on the far side of the street running north and south on my block's eastern border. He seemed rather erratic, and perhaps prone to some degree of violence. To be truthful, I was rather afraid to stand there and openly observe him, so I can't speak with authority about his looks. I walked back towards my building and listened surreptitiously, lest he notice me and decide to bound across the street in pursuit. I think that was prudent.

He seemed to be ranting about something or other. I made out something about either 25 years or 26 years, but couldn't guess as to what that might have meant. It's not so much what he said exactly as the tone with which he said it, and the context in which he was saying it. He had either no place to be at that hour but in the cold, or else he had no inclination to be anywhere but there. As odd as I am, I had no desire to be out there longer than it took to clear my head of some fogginess while reading Hemingway. I doubt that was his story.

I think everybody ought to live in the tight confines of a city for a little while. When you have separation between yourself and the crazies, the poor and the rest of the marginalized, you are apt to forget (or never know) that they are there, and then how can you understand and sympathize? How can you find any desire to fix what lets that guy struggle in that way? I don't understand the man, and I don't understand the system, but I'm sure he shouldn't be out there cursing at nothing.