side by side

I am working on a little collaboration and it involved me having a conversation with someone currently living in the streets. I wanted to be able to get his view of things for this project I am working on (and that part is coming soon) but what really struck me during our conversation was the normalness of his life and yet how not normal it really was. Of how the reality you exist in is normal to you but when you've truly lived through alternate realities it's the memories of the other shinier ones that makes it the hardest to reconcile.

One of the things he brought up was missing being touched. Not necessarily getting laid (he made sure I noted the difference) but just the simple act of touching. That people act afraid of him or put off and give him a wide berth instead of coming close and he can go for weeks or months without ever coming into human contact with another person. As he mentioned that I was sitting across from him with a table in between and so I asked him if I could sit beside him, to just sit, not to do anything weird (I made sure he noted the difference) and he said it was alright by him. So I moved across the table and we sat in the sun for awhile and watched the birds and talked about his view on things. When our conversation was over I thanked him for giving me some of his time and he thanked me for listening and I made sure to hold his hand for a moment as I would do with anyone I feel close to or appreciate because I felt both sitting there with him.

And I walked back out of his reality and back into mine, one that has money in my wallet and a food in my fridge and a fridge itself and it seemed so fundamentally wrong in that moment to so easily be able to walk away and know that I'll be touched a dozen times more before I go to sleep for no good reason at all except because there are people in this world (my child most of all) who want to make sure I am still right here and how I never even consider that the luxury that it is.