I was witness to a moment of lucidity.
As the red light paused my movement in the established ant rut of the paved road, I looked to my right to see a large unkempt man amble back to his shopping cart from the trash can. He and his cart were inhabiting the traffic triangle, the no mans land, the interstitial space that is not big enough to house a Starbucks or a block of section 8 housing, but not small enough to be accomplished with a spray painted arrow. His country represented the space between the right turners and the straight goers. A place of such small regard to be overlooked by most and forgotten by the rest. There he reigned, him and his cart. His hair was like the human caricature of cartoon hair, which in turn is a caricature of human hair, all spikes that move with the head as though one solid mass. These points were blond; what’s left of blond to the visible eye under the dirt and grime that amounted to both a pillow and a sun cover. His cart was heaped with bags and detritus. The bags were tied on in a manner that suggested practice and disregard, flowing over each other like the grapes in a bunch filling the space to make the whole a solid mass of movable “home” the smell of which wound be not unlike those grapes left in the sun past ripe, bringing to call those bugs attracted to decay.
I was on my way from somewhere to somewhere. I had a great sense of expediency and purpose. I no longer remember where I was going or why I was leaving.
From that drive I have taken with me only his face.
I was paused by the regulated traffic signals allowing others to make the transition from somewhere to somethere, and what I took from that entire movement of miles and explosive wheel turning urgency is a moment that this man had of awakening within his self. As I watched is movements his amble gained purpose and comprehension. He didn’t gain direction or need but a consciousness of movement. In the time it took for him to make it back to his cart from the sidewalk across the street where the trash held possibility, he had become aware. This could be seen in the way he surveyed his amalgam of belongings. Knowing all the items in their places, but with the added knowledge of resolute despondency. He tugged on his hair, adding the self to consciousness. Pulling on the bits of stray brown tinged spires to get them to point down, as if they need to subjugate themselves to the paradigm of public appearance. His space collided with that of his basket of comfort, his worldly possessions that keep him alternately warm and cool and fed and high and drunk and entertained and grounded.
He came to the cart.
The cart left in the traffic median between directions of forward momentum, forcing the drivers decision 10 feet before the intersection of choice.
He came to a stop surveying his life on wheels, his cart between us. I could see the way he looked at the bags both seeing them and seeing the thousands of similar iterations of bags tied to carts filled with stuff in his mind with out any hope of knowing if those bags in his mind were phantoms of bags in the past or yet in the future. His inertia of this life brought him to stand next to this cart. His shoulders slumped under the weight of the realizations.
As he stood there surveying the cart, back empty handed from the trash excursion of moments before he reached into the midst and pulled out a jar of peanut butter, like a wave skipper knows when to grab the crab as it tunnels down to escape, at the right time and place and with a firm hand. His peanut butter came out and was held apart from him, as if at half mast, never making it to the zenith of ingestion or to the revulsion of casting it aside. It merely became the palimpsest for the entire contents of the life on coasters before him. The way I could know that his actions were those of pensive scrutiny and not of continued delusion was his eyes.
He looked at his surroundings.
He became a part of the movement of his surroundings.
His posture assumed shame. He qualified his stature and life through his own eyes staring at this peanut butter jar. I could see that the question that was the crux of this moment was weather or not to eat a bit of this, as though this were the elixir that could bring him out of this self-shame and back into the bliss of ignorance and tying bags to this cart or not, to cast aside the mash of legumes into the cart and walk away into the sting of rehabilitation.
The light turned green. I was ushered back into my trajectory by the urgency of those around me. I went.
somewhere.
