on broadway between east 10th and east 11th street, there are two homeless men who beg on the street.
they are almost exactly across the same side of the street from eachother. one sits outside my dorm building while the other sits outside of grace church.
one day i was walking back to my dorm and i saw that the man who usually sits outside of grace church was by my dorm, where the other man usually is. he was rummaging through a pile of blankets on the ground and fisting change out of a large plastic starbucks cup and shoving them into his pockets, very rushed, looking around frantically before dashing across the street again towards grace church.
at grace church he picked up his belongings (a bag. a blanket.) and then ran away towards union square.
i thought it was odd. i didn’t realize what had truly happened until i turned the corner on east 10th and saw the homeless man who had just been robbed peeing on the side of my dorm building.
i felt
so horrified.
i had just witnessed a robbery on the most primal level, a crime, by one homeless man on another. one homeless man stole change from another homeless man.
i quickly got into my building and into the elevator and into my room. i wanted to be far away from the crime i just witnessed, i wanted to be away from the coldness, the ruthlessness of the world and be enveloped by my conceited, sheltered, protective, ignorant college girl life.
this happened almost two weeks ago. ever since that day i’ve been feeling extremely guilty over the matter.
i feel horribly for the homeless man that begs by my building. i encounter about 3~6 homeless people a day, just around the NYU campus, and he is one of the kinder ones. he doesn’t badger you for change, he sits on a piece of carboard wearing too little clothes, clutching just blankets and his starbucks cup.
i found it hard to believe that a person would steal from another— that one person would hurt another when they both suffer the same kind of pain.
like. that shit’s just fucked up, yknow?
it’s naive of me to have thought that there was some kind of like. comraderie among the homeless or whatever. even those who have so little can lose what they have at any moment.
i realize now that the world is indeed very very cruel.
that there are injustices every single day.
and that
i dunno. it makes me so sad.
