so I have this one colleague, right? I don’t know him super well, but we work together on shift sometimes and he’s reliable, got his shit together, efficient and timely.
And he’s polite with the public, too. Says all the right things, smiles when appropriate, patient and helpful, would never step out of line. One hundred percent follows the rules to the letter, hands-off, no abusive language, no violence. Straight and narrow all the way.
And when I first met him, I was put off about how he talks about people. I still am, honestly. It’s private and quiet and discrete, not where anyone could see or overhear, but he says things to me. “That one got hit with the ugly stick”. “He looks fuckin’ handicapped”. “Look at that crackhead”. “Maybe I’d feel bad for them if they got off their asses and got their lives together”.
It started quite a few arguments between us, but it never changed that his ACTIONS were always fair and respectful, so I let it slide as one of those things you can’t change about others and just kind of have to put up with. We work together fine, and I don’t react to it anymore, and he treats people well.
One day he said he saw me buying a coffee for a homeless guy when I was off shift.
The guy in question was someone we both knew from work was a pain in the ass, high or drunk more often than not, criminal record a mile long, with the kind of mental health issues that aren’t as sympathetic because they mostly just make him act like a violent asshole. Too ill to be prosecuted, to aggressive and unpredictable for a care aid and public housing, so he gets by stealing and shooting up and threatening anyone who tries to stop him.
He’s an unhappy soul. There are very few places he’s welcome.
But I was buying myself a drink, and he was outside, and it was cold out, and out of uniform I know it’s an 80% chance he’ll have no idea who I am or that he said he’d cut my head off last week, so I figured I’d grab him a coffee. Double-double, cause sugar helps and I’d seen him eat ice cream before so cream probably wouldn’t hurt.
I handed it to him on my way out. Told him to stay safe. He took it. Didn’t say thank-you, but I wasn’t really expecting him to anyways. I’d never spoken with him outside of an active conflict before, so I don’t even know what he’d have sounded like not-angry and mostly-sober.
But anyway, apparently my colleague saw, and he asked why the hell I’d waste the money.
I didn’t know what to tell him. It was just two dollars. I’d spent more than that on the second-hand bowl that had fallen off my dish rack and shattered the other night. And it was cold out, and the guy was probably banned from anywhere warm in town, and if he wanted something bad enough he’d probably just steal it anyways, and then it’s be someone else’s problem. But mostly, he was just the kind of guy nobody is happy to see, who was welcome nowhere, and had nowhere to go, and maybe when you’re trapped in a life like that something small and decent doesn’t come around very often.
I didn’t know what to tell him. So I just said, “I felt like it.”
He rolled his eyes a bit, but didn’t hassle me about it. I got the feeling he still thought I was being stupid or naive. He seems to think I don’t understand how he world works, or how awful and heartless people can be.
I don’t know why he thinks that. We work the same job, and we’ve shared a lot about where we’ve been. We both know how awful people can be.
But then maybe a month later he shows up for shift change. And when he does, he has this weird energy about him, like a little kid who just found their first rubik’s cube and hasn’t figured out if they like it or not.
“I pulled a you,” he said, like he was making fun of himself.
I asked what he meant, what had happened.
He said he’d seen a guy, a different guy, another person on the street when we both saw all the time. “I went to grab lunch and he was there,” he said. “And you know, he’s got no money, he’s homeless, but he never causes trouble, never steals, doesn’t show up drunk. So I figured, what the hell, and I covered his bill.”
He wasn’t looking at me as he said it, just staring off with an odd energy. If it wasn’t so subtle I’d call it excitement, like little-kid excitement, but it was almost nothing. “I told ‘em not to say it was me. Didn’t wanna have to talk to him. Thought it’d be weird.”
It was totally out of left-field. Completely against the image he projected of polite distance, judgemental side comments.
I asked him, “feels good, huh?”
He shrugged, but it seemed like he was still thinking about it.
He still says unkind and hurtful things about people, though. But the other day he said something about how he didn’t care about people, didn’t care when the news said folks were dying of the flu, didn’t get upset over strangers like that.
I said, “But it’s sad, isn’t it?”, and he shook his head. “You can’t care about everyone. That would be exhausting.” And I think that’s when I figured it out.
We both do the same work. We’ve both come from similar places. And yet the way we feel about others is different.
This is a guess, but I don’t think he’s a cruel or unkind person at heart. A guess, but I suspect that after seeing so much stupid, senseless cruelty… Je cares about people, but caring hurts. Caring means you can be let down, disappointed, fucked over. Caring about everyone means suffering when they suffer, and that’s a lot of pain for one person to handle. And I suspect that maybe when he says cruel things, when he says he doesn’t care, it’s because he’s scared of his own empathy. That if he truly let himself love everyone, he couldn’t survive the hurt of it.
Which is purer, in a way, than my own sort of caring. My caring, I think, is much more selfish.
I’ve been hurt too. I’ve seen bad things, too. And when I closed myself off like that, I became a cold and bitter person, and the colder and more bitter you are, the colder and more bitter others are back, until all you can see is the worst in everything and almost nothing can drag you out of the pit you’ve dug yourself into.
I think he’s cold because he’s afraid of love. I think he knows that loving others makes you vulnerable regardless of your actions, so he does what he can to dislike people before he becomes attached.
I think I love because if I didn’t, I’d hate. I’d hate everybody. I’d hate people I care about.
I think I need to love everybody, care about everybody, at least a little tiny bit, because if any single person was unworthy then anyone could be unworthy, and how on earth would I know?
The man I bought coffee for didn’t bother us that day. Didn’t bother us for a few weeks. I try not to hope the two things are related.
Another guy I knew from the street got clean. Got a house. Was going back to school, before he fell off the wagon.
He’s on the street again, now.
Seeing him back out there hurts.
It probably wouldn’t hurt if I didn’t give a shit, if I wasn’t kind of excited for him, if I wasn’t still kind of hoping he’d get clean again.
He has no idea who I am, though. We only met once, maybe four years ago now.
I’m still hoping I’ll see him around town again soon, standing upright without the black stains on his fingers, smiling like he was when he came by with his social worker.
I think most people have the impulse to care. I think the choices they make don’t reflect their capacity for love so much as they indicate what scares us more- pain and power and how we let it in.
We have shift change again twenty minutes.
I’m not sure what else to say.
Would you rather be stabbed in the back, or buried alive?
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