And sometimes I can be standing in a crowd of friends, in silence inside, even when I allude to be outspoken about random bullshit to cover the silent, aching thoughts. I can be in the midst of commotion and city lights and I glance at strangers and know they’re missing that one thing. That one answer, that one smile from a stranger or kindness, that one break from life and all it’s turmoil and greivance. This is what I see.
A man walks by, model citizen, perfectly happy and impenetrable, talking on his advanced Bluetooth, drinking down a hot coffee and eating an energy bar for the morning rush. He glances at his Rolex watch, reaches for his phone, continues to text and pauses at the picture of his kids he never sees and for a brief moment, there is that little crinkle and worry line that drowns his eye lids. For a split second, his shoulders shift to incompetence, he tells the assistant to call him back and he clicks the little device with his finger, yapping in his ear, off. He slides it into his pocket and pauses while waiting for the pedestrian light to give him the right of way, as he juggles his briefcase, attempts to keep down his energy bar, his coffee and the lump in his throat slowly rising from that teeny picture on his phone. He doesn’t notice the wrapper to the energy bar floating away in the wind and landing three feet in front of the trash. He doesn’t notice the walking sign and the seconds counting down until it’s not safe. He doesn’t feel his phone vibrate in his hands, he simply stares at the picture on his screen of years ago. He doesn’t feel the bicycler rush by him or hear the annoying chizzle of the city.
The sign reaches 5. He’s still staring and remembering his wife’s perfume that day. 4, the seconds seem like days on this corner street. Days he can barely remember. 3, Days he had a minute to breathe and lay in bed all afternoon. 2, Days he fed off his wife’s skin by the pale moon light and rising sun. 1, Days where his oldest son was proud of him and days long ago, where he knew his daughters favorite menial statistics such as food and colors, clothing and attitude, friends and gossip and those talks about life.
An old woman staggering slowly from a few feet behind, stops gracefully, silently and picks up the wrapper, dancing in the cold, eastern wind. Her legs bow and her shoulders are hunched and you can see pain in every, lonely step. She has spent her entire lifetime working hard on those hands and knees, scrubbing, cleaning, polishing and dusting. You can see her fighting the wind to stoop low enough, just enough to reach the particle on the ground. Her hands silk with leather, thin, frail leather with long, bony nails and a yellow-red tint. The wind whipping at her legs, at her hair. This woman has been fighting the wind for a lifetime and she accomplishes this painful task with such grace, with such posture and selfless act. It was never the reaching for her goal that was off course, it was getting back up if the wind, won.
The business man receives another phone call, ripping him out of his memory bank.
With haste and frustration, he reaches back in his pocket, takes the last bite of his bar, glugs a sip of his coffee, nearly burning himself and slides the ear piece back where it belonged. He looks both ways and waits to dodge traffic while his index finger reaches up and answers the call. Now, he was thirty seconds off from schedule and the aggravation, the standards he held himself to, and his employees, resumed in his shoulder blades, the way he took his first step off the sidewalk, with haste and pertinence. Immediately the world around him has resumed and his shoudlers straighten out, he grips his suitcase again and he can hear the fading sounds of brakes and rushing people as he enters the building directly across the way.
He skips taking the elevator and heads straight for the stairs. Two by two he climbs and loosens his tie. He bursts into his office, the secretary following him through the doorway, going over the day’s itinerary and interview outline and for the first time in five years, he puts his hands up calmly in the air, shakes them with a smile and asks her for just a minute, to get settled. Slightly confused, she leaves the room, panicked because of the agenda and limited time frame and worried because of his behavior. He smiled? He sits down and puts his elbows on the desk and recites the exact phrases he wants to emphasize in his interview, while the numbers still counted down in the back of his head. There is that lump again, rising to his throat. He ignores it and keeps repeating his well written words. Words and thoughts that keep his mind occupied over and over as he attempts to sleep at night.
The older lady outside, who had picked up the trash, walks slowly as permanently, time slows down around her from age. It’s unrelenting, cruel and diminishing values of pain and time’s ever powerful wind carries the sound of the city silently around her. Age has also taken her hearing. In half the time it takes for him to make ten steps back, she has made one ahead of her. She leaves three hours early for work every day.
She has a poise, a way to her crooked walk which is unlike most that walk by. An infectious humility, a humbleness to seek, that inner strength inside. That silence I speak of, peace.
It wasn’t her wrapper, but it’s her earth. It wasn’t all his fault he didn’t notice, but it’s her duty to be his eyes when he can’t see and she had never met him in her life, but every morning they pass, slowly and steady she stoops, quickly and hurriedly, he rushes by.
One morning in fall, he steps out and can see his own breath. It’s been a good day and he’s thinking how good it felt to go camping with the kids those years ago. How wonderful it was to take his wife to the beach and the lump hits him again, rising this time from what seems the pit of his soul. I watch him silently all these days. An image of her frail shoulders blips by. He closes his eyes and the sun peaks red through his watered eye lids and once again he is standing on that same corner, the timer counting down, and he is unaware he is able to move and that he’s about to drop his coffee. He can no longer hear the city as it wheezes and hurls by and whips him in the wind. He only sees her bare, pale scalp in his hands the night she left him, trailing across his shut eyes in the red, red sun. His mind flashes back and forth from one split memory to the next in a fraction of a second. He sees the divorce papers on the kitchen table. He sees the woman’s face he had an affair with and then he sees his dying wife, at her worst, the most beautiful thing he’d ever encountered, he’d ever breathed. One single tear fell onto his jacket, the first of many to years of none and he steps down, off the sidewalk, doesn’t look in either direction and suddenly, he hears a halt of traffic.
Two cars down, in the center of the intersection lies an old lady, not moving and exuding the same beautiful, sudden and long needed peace as his wife, the most beautiful thing he’d ever encountered again. In her finger tips she grasps a single wrapper. The man turns, bends down and shuts her eyes and says the first prayer he’s said of many to years of none and one single tear falls on her jacket.
People come in and out of your life. Life is the essence of existing, of all that is, good or bad. Without bad, we would not know good. When I sit back and watch this man pause in the early mornings for those 30 seconds, I wonder why a tear fell. I wonder why he thought that those memories were 30 seconds wasted of his precious time? What is time? I wonder why he ignored the lump that was rising like so many of us do to muddle through and become just another wrapper or piece of trash, floating around in the wind to be picked up and thrown away by grace. I wonder how it’s become acceptable in our society for our children to be our boss’ financially because of pressure, when there’s no such thing as the perfect home? I wonder why, as boss’s, we govern when we don’t need to intervene and what gives us the right, what makes us the ones who want to be set apart from the rest and paid higher because of what we do? Why do we pay and judge by quality of life when no one on the planet seems equal? When did there become corporate food chains and we’re all a bunch of teeeeeny snacks? I wonder how he doesn’t notice how often he litters and I wonder, I just wonder how he might not care.
I wonder what reaped him from life to the point where smiling was unusual at work?
I often wonder where these people on bicycles are peddling so fast to get to?
I wonder to myself in silence why people can’t throw away trash three feet from them? And then I wonder the most confusing thing of all.
Why did he say a prayer now as if he knew that woman? She needed his trash by fate to be there that day to have the inevidible, last string of grace, break. And he needed her there to remind him of the beauty that peace holds, even in death.
The police show up and carry her away like a disposal of waste. They write down her statistics as if she were an object, a nothingness. They ask people standing around if they saw what happened.
The business man jogs up to the top floor faster than he has ever before, the lump heaving in his core. He shuts the door so quickly behind him that his secretary had no time to stand and he locked it behind him. He didn’t understand why this was happening but before he knew it, he was curled on the floor in front of the door, knees to chest like a child again, crying so silently from a place deep within, an untouchable place of healing. He wring’s his hands white and screams silently into his jaw line by gritting his teeth.
We often try to come to terms and find answers in life for a lot of things. Death the most precident of them all. We try to place blame or acknowledgement on events that can not be labeled or defined. We rush through life and don’t listen to our instinct to take a day off and when did we become a nation of people who thought that even 30 seconds was a waste?
When did we start watching our kids grow up on youtube? When did we start working too late to miss dinner so we can buy that Xbox they wanted? When was a Rolex and an office with a view cool enough to replace your wife, enough to cheat to get it? When did the world become so loud?
I look around and I see people of all different situations in life walk passed me. When did we forget to smile back? When did we become bitter and when will it be an entire race of humans, loving, humans?
When did money, prints on paper, smooshed tree, become valuable enough to compromise our morals, our souls and our standards set for ourselves?
We evolved as humans over time. Evolution has been kind to us as a whole.
The only reason we are more smart and communicate so effectively, more so than other animals is because our wisdom teeth changed and so did our jaws. Thus, resulting in the ability for our brains to grow and lower into regions it hadn’t. Animals live their lives in a certain silence yet they love, they clean, they nurture, they take care of themselves and still provide shelter, even in the rain, even to complete stragglers.
Why does it take so much for us to stop and do what we should have done once upon a time? Why did it take him that long to admit he needed to mend his relationship with his kids and wife, when it was nearly too late. Why didn’t he go with his gut when he wanted to take the day off that first morning and take his daughters to a show?
