Promise To Myself

I don’t write as much anymore. Maybe, I am not reading as much. I don’t know or maybe it’s true that writing often comes from a sad place.

I went for a few events this week – some with my boss, some with my housemates. Most were about entrepreneurship – solving customers’ problems and needs. So then, writing can become labored and twisted to tell the story the individual wants or desires to. You just need to know whom you are narrating the tale to.

My emotions have been labored and exorcised in another outlet – cooking. It’s incredibly therapeutic to know what I am eating when I am cooking a dish for myself. To know what spices, herbs you are adding. To have fingertips smelling of lingering garlic and chopped onions. On Wednesday, I had wanted to forego my library trip – the hail and the cold of the winter seemingly forces to be reckoned with. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar was waiting on hold in the library for me but my dilemma was fixed when the Corney Island F train whisked away, split seconds too late, and there by a stroke of luck (or God’s plan?) thundered a Manhattan-bound F train into the platform. I let my gut instincts lead me to where it hinted I should – the Mid-Manhattan Library.

The library was not truly my real destination. There, I saw – on the hailing enroute from mid-Manhattan library back to the 34th Street Bryant Park’s D train platform - a homeless guy or lady (I do not know for he or she was wrapped in a grimy black hood, their hair a clumped and unkempt mess) seated on the cold, lifeless floor with two dogs huddled beside.  They looked incredibly kept, snuggled warm in their coats while (s)he – scuffed and dirty - was consumed with the task and want to clean their paws. Something grew inside of me. In the city of visible homelessness, it’s easy to be desensitized to their circumstance and plight. After awhile, they became another face, another number, another statistics frozen and static in the menial landscape and backdrop of the never-ending New York winter rush. I walked back and poured whatever little spare change I had into his/her little cup.

I remembered an icy night, where I was out and navigating my way with a Google Map on my hand. It started wrinkling like a sour prune from the harsh wind chills and became red, raw and numb from the exposed cold. I could only begin to feel my hand after I ran it down with hot gushing water – it felt like a privilege then. Even so, we tend to forget the privileges that we have been gifted. That night, I remember the pained and aged expression of an old homeless man with his swollen feet, sitting alone in a corner in the G train, nursing his numbed foot and nursing the physical (and emotional ostracization) hurt that might have been there.

It is a customary experience to enter a crowded subway cabin and to smell a foul reeking stench only to see a covered man nestled limply in a neglected lonely corner – as it was a shameful means to sit in the center of a packed subway train, as it was inhuman and undignified to be without a home, to be smelling of days spent without proper grooming and hygiene facilities because what is hygiene when you are freezing and starving in & out of the crevices of your soul and melting into the frames of your skeletal ribcages, starved from human empathy and nourishment. I admit I am afraid of talking and asking and of clarifying assumptions; the anxieties pounded by the belief and stereotype that “they brought it up themselves” or “they just have no want to be employed” or “that they might hurt you”. But when I see the tender manner in which (s)he cleaned the paws of his familiar dogs, I like to believe (s)he is as human or if not even more so than the majority. This is not a checklist but an expectation: To accord them their human dignity by not walking away from the direction of the stench. To not automatically and subconsciously assume that they are perpetrators of their own circumstances.

Moving here and living on an intern pay (Maybe its akin to Joan Didion's my silly pride: 'I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself' - a refusal to be dependent on his (my) privileges). I realized I need little to lead a sufficient and adequate life. I had believed I needed more but when I see my pantry and fridge stuffed and brimming with groceries and food, I realized its more than enough for myself. I have excess groceries and spare changes to buy a few dog treats and to make a packed sandwich or two for my next library trip. And I promise to say hi the next time.