I’m feeling a little shell shocked these days.
So many people around me are suffering so much, some self inflicted, others due to illness.
I saw an old friend yesterday, Dee. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year and a half, by his choice.
At least, I think it was him who I saw.
The last time I saw him he was a 37-year-old man. The fellow I saw yesterday appeared to be 47, and a hard, cruel 47 at that.
He walked right by me, traveling the opposite direction on the sidewalk.
It’s possible he didn’t want me to see him, or, as the look of anxiety and grief showing on his face seemed to indicate, he was so involved with some interior concern, he didn’t even notice me.
He had appeared to have aged so much in such a little time.
I wondered what had been going on in his life that aged him so dramatically, and made him look so distraught and so unlike himself.
I knew he hadn’t been working for years, and was living on social assistance.
Over the last year, I also heard rumor that he had taken to stealing to sustain himself.
(I had long ago stopped ‘helping’ him with money, for several reasons, not the least of which was because it wasn’t ‘helping’ him at all. I have long suspected that was one of the reasons he decided to stop being my friend. But I’ll never really know.)
I didn’t stop him. I didn’t call his name and run over to speak to him.
I don’t think he would have wanted that.
I think he didn’t want anyone to see him.
And I didn’t want to see the question forming in his eye as we casually stood and chatted, “Maybe you have $20 dollars you can give me?”
Tonight, I ran into another old friend, Rick, with whom I hadn’t spoken for many months, as he is very difficult to get a hold off. He is either ensconced in a hospital, or out of town.
He suffers from several illnesses; leukemia being the one that has wrapped it’s sucking fingers around him and is draining him to the end.
He’s taken to hanging around in the roughest neighborhoods, and I suspect that he’s finding solace in the cheap drugs to be found there, as prescribed morphine is incredibly expensive.
I used to give him money, too, to help him cover the insane cost of dying from a leeching disease, but I don’t have enough to help and feed myself.
He used to be full of life, interested in everything, always had a plan for his life.
Now his pale face and flat eyes appear to see the world through a dense, cloying fog that chokes him, and blurs the smile he tries to call up for me at our chance meeting.
He tells me that my ex-friend, Dee whom he also knows, now lives in a shelter.
Ah, that may explain his grim expression, and sad demeanor when I saw the other day.Rick spoke little about his own life; I suspect he has very little to say, and wants to hide his pain as much as possible.
I wonder, if I were in his shoes, that I would not care to run into old friends whom you once knew in the glow of health...I might not want to have them witness a decline and fall for which they can do very little but weep.
This weekend has been difficult and troubling.
I’m not sure what to make of it.
I suspect this feeling of breathless confusion is with me to stay until I do make heads or tails of it, and can come to some kind of terms with all of these oddly juxtaposed people in my life.
Why are they all here, and why are they suffering so much?
I know there’s nothing I can do, I can’t save Dee from his world, and Rick is dying from something I have no control over.
And the other doesn’t want help.
Why do they continue to show up in my life?
What am I supposed to do?
