Bent, Not Broken

The city is full of the energy of a million people who are forced to live on top of, next to and below one another, sharing things as intimate as air, as moving as music, or shouting or crying. You share time and space with total strangers, in a movement so swift through the rush of traffic or the push in a crowd. A stranger sits beside you and smokes; a neighbor, nameless and unknown, calls chemical trucks to spray the lawn, the bugs, the weeds; while another a few blocks away begins to gasp for air and knows not why.

In the heart of downtown, as you exit a café, a musician sits solitary with his instrument, playing with his hat set on a street covered in layers of humanity. He seeks to perform for his next bottle of comfort and escape, and you drop change from your cappuccino into his hat, hoping he will buy a meal instead.

You rush to the nearest mall, the size of a college campus, searching for the greatest gift ever. You find yourself on an obstacle course, moving this way and that, occasionally bumping shoulders and swaying to miss this baby carriage or that weary shopper, looking into windows and wishing.

Your eyes grow wary as you see a group of youths, faded into themselves, absorbed, oblivious, unattended. Some have scarred their faces and bodies, pierced and cut and tattooed, with hair taking on unnatural shades of pink and green. They view you with distaste, and if empowered by numbers even intimidate with gestures or words--and suddenly the mall becomes small. I remember the days of my own youth, and find that somehow the young of today have crossed into a place of apathy and danger, a place that I cannot understand, and therefore I find within my heart fear.

The city with its million people would be a fine place if I was healthy and strong, but in the winter of my forty second year, in a weak and vulnerable place, my husband Joey and I headed south, to find another way to live.