And That's That

Funny story. I'm sitting here at my computer in the morning, drinking coffee and rustling leaves and - since today's trash day and there's a heap outside our's and our neighbor's door, two weeks worth - a homeless man starts going through it. I can see him clearly through my window in the brightening sunshine. He's humming a loud tune, alternately singing it, from his throat, shouting it, at times, telling the world, the brick, the botched sky, "hey, I'm here, I exist, baby, whether you like it or not," but this pride may be the last thing on his mind - or perhaps not.

Anyways, so he's rustling through the trash, as I'm going through my computer, looking for a way to make progress in my life. I need a new job; I need to be published more; I need an in. Blah blah. . . I had Norah Jones' new album, The Fall, playing through the morning to help me with my search.

The homeless man rips the plastic, still humming, and - what! - pulls out, of all things, the tome, my portfolio, my pre-graduate school portfolio. When I came to Baltimore I knew I'd be bombarded and corrupted - which I was ready for, dying for - so I carefully placed my last five years' work, my heart, into a leather bound notebook full of laminated slips. Just last week, I printed out a thinner version of what it all had become, and tossed the old big fucking thing. He put the black thing aside and kept searching.

Now for a moment, I felt myself get protective over it, as if I would go out there and tell him to return it to its rightful place: the trash. Ha! I felt myself relax. I mean really relax. I watched him shuffle through the shit a second or two more, and, finding nothing, he put my fight, my solitary light, that space I'd created for myself all that time when I felt my parents leaning down on me with worry I had no use for; under his arm, he put it under his arm, and walked off with it.