Words that haunt me

I had a friend kill herself years ago and sometimes my brain likes to replay the scenario in my mind as I sleep. This is the bit that seems to stick in my mind.

In truth I knew she was sad, I could feel it. Even when she tried to hide it I could see the sadness in her eyes. Several times I told her I was there, but I never really was there, was I? No, I was too busy dealing with my own problems to listen to hers. I knew she desperately needed someone to talk to, but I felt it wasn’t MY JOB to pull it out of her so I left it to someone else, but everyone else felt the same way I did. No one wanted to be responsible for helping her, we were all too busy. Something she said to me a few days before she died still haunts me, she mentioned how odd it is that people are so disconnected these days; How everyone knows when something’s wrong, but we’re all too wrapped up in our selfish lives that we refuse to see the shit when we’re standing in it. And on the rare occasion when we do see it, we just brush it aside and hope someone else will step in it after us, and that will then obligate them to clean it up.

We’re all standing in shit, aren’t we?

I dreamt of her last night and as I was walking through the park I replayed those words over and over, "we're all standing in shit, aren't we?" I couldn't silence them, I couldn't ignore them.

I met a nice man at the park today. He was feeding the ducks as I sat on the park bench near the big pond. He came over to pet my Lilo and talk to me. Everyone else had successfully ignored him as well as the rest of the homeless people wandering around, but I found him to not be a threat and let him sit and talk with me. He was gentle and kind and Lilo took to him immediately. After learning he had fought wars, raised a son and then lost that son to war he mentioned to me that he was hungry, tired, scared, and alone all the time. I asked him why he fed the ducks the bread that he could be eating and he said to me, "I'd rather feel good about something I've done than have a belly full of bread. The ducks don't need the bread, but that little girl over there laughed for 10 minutes as the ducks swarmed around her while I shared the bread with them. A smile, laughter, a kind word, those are all worth losing bread over."

I bought him lunch and thanked him for the smiles and the stories.

Isn't it odd how things play out?