To the man who used to live by the river

Today I saw your cart laying on its side in the river. I first noticed something was off when I jogged past your usual spot under the bridge to find your cart, rather than spilling over with the same grocery bags and trinkets that I'd grown accustomed to over the year, nearly empty; it's former contents littering the ground and jogging path. Over the next weeks, I kept looking for you, expecting to see your familiar shape huddled in your maroon blankets and sleeping bag...but the only thing I saw was that same cart, each day looking more dilapidated and abandoned as it moved by unseen hands ever closer to the river. I worried for you, this person I'd become used to seeing every day while out on my usual jog. This person who was always sleeping under a pile of blankets, surrounded by empty bottles from attempts to dull whatever pain it was that you were facing. I felt something of a kinship with you...and I'm embarrassed to admit now, I also felt a bit of pride about worrying over you. As if that, all by itself, made me a good person. But then I realized that in the hundreds of times that I did see you, I never once made an attempt to make a show of solidarity or even acknowledge your existence. All this worry and kinship was just a fantasy that existed only in my head.

So...that realization didn't make me feel so great. I may as well have been harboring delusions about my superiority over you and making erroneous moral judgments about why you were there. That's the lovely flip side to keeping our thoughts private: we don't harm anyone but ourselves with the bile of our own prejudice. But there does seem to be something...I don't know. Something wrong about harboring a fantasy of kindness and never actually sharing it. If I get to feel good about myself for not conveying contempt when I feel it toward someone else then it follows that I don't get to feel like a hero for secretly worrying over you.

Alright then. I promise you, right here and now that if I do see you again, I will acknowledge you. Probably not by talking to you...I could say that it's because you've always been sleeping whenever I've passed by but that wouldn't be completely true. The combination of my social anxiety and fear of engaging a strange man while I'm alone with my two small children hold me back. But I will pick up a couple things from the market for you that will hopefully be helpful and show you that you're not alone. I hope to see you again, even as I hope that I never do because you've found a better situation. But most of all, I hope I will actually take action next time when I'm in a similar situation instead of doing nothing until it's too late.