The Faces Change

There was a time when I would see someone sitting in a doorway
and, if I was buying coffee, I would buy another, maybe a sandwich too.
Nothing much. No questions, no need to know how they had arrived there.
Just “Here you go, mate.”

The faces changed. The situation didn't.

I never knew their names, and they never knew mine.
Perhaps that matters, because I cannot pretend these were friendships,
or dress a few pounds spent in a café as some great act of compassion.
I had enough for two coffees; I only needed one,
and for a moment our lives happened to occupy the same piece of pavement.

Then money became tight.

Not poetically tight. Not the sort of poverty that improves with metaphor,
just bills on the table and too little left after paying them,
when two pounds here and four pounds there suddenly acquire importance
and the extra coffee becomes something you promise yourself you'll return to
when there is a little more room between what comes in and what must go out.

At first I still saw them.

That may be the part I remember most clearly now.
Walking past and knowing I was walking past, avoiding an eye perhaps,
with an apology offered silently because saying it aloud would have seemed absurd.
Sorry, mate. Not today.

But today became tomorrow, tomorrow slipped into another, and necessity became routine.
I grew practised at passing doorways without the small discomfort of noticing,
and somewhere in that repetition something happened that I cannot date.
I stopped having to tell myself that I couldn't afford the coffee
because eventually I stopped thinking about the coffee at all.

The faces changed. The situation didn't.

Then my situation changed.
There was money enough again for the unnecessary things,
enough to add something to an order without calculating what it displaced,
enough that the reason I had once walked past no longer followed me.
But habits are strange things. They do not always leave when their reasons do.
Mine remained, quietly efficient, asking nothing of me.

I walked past.

Not cruelly. Not deliberately.
There was no decision, no moment I can point to and say
this was when I stopped.

It had no moment.

Somewhere between not being able to give and being able to give again,
I had learned the habit of not seeing.

And now, absurdly, money is tight again.

Once more I count what remains and know that an extra coffee is not always nothing,
that kindness does not make the electricity cheaper or put food in my own cupboard,
and I find myself standing almost where I stood all those years ago.

Almost.

Because now I know what disappeared.

It wasn't the coffee. It wasn't the sandwich.
It was only ever, “Here you go, mate,”
a recognition passed between two strangers
who knew nothing about each other
except that one was sitting in a doorway
and the other paused.

And today I may have nothing in my pocket I can afford to give,
but I can look towards the doorway rather than through it.
I can meet the eyes of the person sitting there,
even when all I have to offer is
“Morning, mate.”

The faces will change. The situation hasn’t.

But this time, as I walk past,

I see them.