Agony on the subway

All that mattered was that I be given some sign to disrupt my doubts about him. I craned forward to look at his cart, stuffed with just a few too many things to be quite respectable. A jacket, slightly old, not quite clean, not quite dirty. Hunched, busily eating from a styrofoam box. Plastic grocery bags holding things, slightly ragged and discoloured in a way that comes from long use. At least if he had a family, I wouldn't care if he was a slob, or a weirdo or even a bum. Everyone's gotta have a family.

It takes a really enlightened person to be happy and just not give a damn about what kind of presentation he's giving to me. He could be a bum, but he could just be an oddity. A happy oddity with a family and a life that didn't suck. His face was vaguely familiar. It was painful. I might look a bit like that in thirty years. He didn't look that bad. He was clean-shaven.

I stayed past my usual stop looking for last-second clues. He picked up a newspaper and read it. I could read this any number of ways. He stuffed it into his already cluttered cart. I had seen larger and messier bum-carts before, and some totally happy people just want to push all their junk around in a cart. I didn't want to feel bad about this guy. As long as he had someone waiting for him at the end of that subway ride I was fine with it.

I want to project a happy life onto strangers who bring out my insecurities. I'm arguably either an extremely privileged, successful person, or a deadbeat.