I’m walking home from a night class. I forgot my umbrella but it’s only spitting.
The Main is one-way, and the cars with their headlights come in my direction. I hate that. I can’t stand the idea of someone noticing me from their car. I can’t stand the idea of someone staring at me from behind their headlights.
The alley down to my place is shared by two bars, a strip club and a porn theatre. Men stumble out, too embarrassed to even look at me. Drug dealers and prostitutes all mind their own business. We don’t notice each other; we just overlap.
I get to the square in front of my building and sit on a bench to have a smoke. It’s a rough neighborhood but my building is new and clean – part of an incoming gentrification-spree.
A homeless woman comes up to me, saying something in a muffled, wheezing kind of yell that most homeless women seem to know. She sits next to me and I think, “Great.”
I know. I know. I’m the problem.
How dare I live here. How dare I call this woman wheezy.
I’m just sitting here getting rained on. Avoiding going inside. Trying to mind my own business. But other people’s business always seems to find me.
She asks me for a cigarette and I don’t mind. I kind of like her – coming out of nowhere, getting rained on like nothing was.
I might as well have company in whatever this is anyway.
She’s sweet, and it’s real. We’re just two women who don’t want to go inside, wherever that is, and are sitting here getting rained on instead.
It’s hard to really understand what she says when she talks. It’s all kind of muffled. Like she doesn’t know where her voice is, so air is just getting pushed up from her lungs into rounded noises from her mouth.
Her name is May and soon she has her arm around me and is kissing my cheek like I’m a long lost friend she’s so relieved to find.
The saliva on my face makes me uncomfortable. Surprisingly little though. Like I said, she seems like a good person. I like her.
I’m done my cigarette and give her a few more for the road. I give her the only money I have on me, a fiver, in case it helps. She’s beside herself.
She tells me I can’t go. She has to give me something to thank me. She notices her pinky ring. I had complemented her on it before. She takes it off and puts it on my finger. I say no. “No, no.”
She won’t hear it. I end up with her pinky ring.
I say goodbye to May. Sitting in the rain like she is. Two cigarettes and five dollars later.
I hope to see her again. It’s nice to have a friend.
Author: Lysha Del
Email: [email protected]
Author Bio: Lysha is a creative writing grad with two cats and a cycling addiction.
Link to social media or website: Twitter @LyshaDel_
