photo: Franco Folini/ BY-NC-SA

By Kyle Farris

I saw a woman once. She was crying for help.

I was with my mom when I saw her. We were on 4th street, just off Central. I don’t remember what we were doing. It doesn’t really matter.

Like I said, I don’t remember.

I remember sitting, just sitting, talking, then seeing a woman. I didn’t even need to see the thread bare clothing, or the unwashed hair to tell she was homeless. They say after all, that you can’t really tell if a person is homeless. That’s a lie. For a person truly in need, you can see the burden pushing them down. You can see the effort of the struggle reflected out of their eyes.

That look never goes away. Like veterans of a war, the homeless are forever marked by their lives.

With this woman, it showed more than most.

She didn’t cry tears from her eyes, which were hollow and scared. She didn’t cry pleas from her lips; she was eating a popsicle.

She cried like a child, silent and frightened, lost in a crowd. She looked like a little girl, although she clearly wasn’t, hair grayed and face lined by years of hardship. Like a little girl who lost her parents in a mall, timidly eating a popsicle a kind stranger had given her.

No one went near her, so she sat, alone in the square, looking quietly around.

No one looked at her either, except maybe to notice the melting popsicle trickling down onto her hands and ragged brown coat.

She never spoke, never asked for money, or food, so no one even saw her crying to be helped.

I’ve met literally hundreds like her, in food lines, on street corners, in squares just like that one. The untouchables and lepers of our society, people so worn down that most don’t even have the strength left to do anything except ask shamefaced for spare change from passerbys. Almost all homeless people, like her, are just like lost children, living off of the spare change given from kind strangers.

All, like her, crying in ways we never see.