I can recall, with a shameful fondness, begging my friends at our high school lunch table for their lunch scraps. (My friends had awesome lunches.) Because I'd grown up with them, I was comfortable shamelessly begging from them knowing that they liked me for my quirks, not despite them.
Annoyed, they rarely gave me what I begged for, intensifying my desires and leading me to entertaining all sorts of other evils later on in life. Without the bumpers of their stinginess to stop me, my gluttony, like my ego, became insatiable.
(I don't blame them. (But I do digress.))
As I left shelter one beautiful afternoon in the present day, I pulled my sunglasses from my pocket and my pen fell out with it.
A derelict man, too impoverished for a phone, sat on the curb in front of me. Unable to share his early Spring experience on Facebook or Insta, he was forced to enjoy the sunshine for what it was worth. Like the ancients before him, he was thereby attuned to the world, and upon seeing my pen touch the parking lot he croaked, pointing: "Hey your thing."
"Ah, thank you!" I responded with glee, bending over, cautious not to be too friendly as to inspire a conversation, the sunshine barely warming my soul to pity his.
"Cigarette for 50 cents?" he asked, as I moved away from him and on to my life on the mainland while he remained fixed to that curb and transfixed by the sun.
I wondered if this was an example of an ethical dilemma as I turned to take him up on his generously unsolicited offer. The day did indeed inspire a cigarette in me, and I was hoping he had menthols....then I'd realized that he was soliciting me for a cigarette, and not the other way around.
Feeling a new kinship with my clientele, I continued to the bus, content in the knowledge that everything was in its right place; I was finally among my own kind.
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