stranger
I perched on the edge of the bed, twenty minutes before the appointed time with my friend. Since I was ready for off and it took only 10 minutes to get to the downtown, I turned on the facebook to kill some time. Then one video with hundreds of thousands of ‘likes’ arrested my eyes. A picture of old woman pulling a handcart full of cardboards was in the thumbnail of the video, and it was so obvious that it would be about another similar poor senior citizen. For no reason I played the video, and when it ended, with the eyes full of tears, I lamented about the brusquerie of people towards the poor ones, and became one of the hundreds of thousands of the people who pressed ‘Like’ on it.
Soon I met my friend at downtown. It rained less than a day ago but midsummer’s strong sunlight turned the air bright and hot in a second. Old lady in the video was already forgotten in my head, and I was walking with my friend, cracking some joke, when I saw that man again. Just as he did every other days, the man was dragging himself, a radio with song as old as rhyme, and a tin with few coins in it on a small flat cart. Drooped rubber pants stained with thick white paint were dragged slowly in the place where the man’s real legs should be, as if they represent the sorrows of the man’s past 60 years of life. People in the street all ignored his barely audible voice, asking for help, as if it was such a familiar scene, and so did my friend and I. However when the man’s worn-out radio passed by me, the video of old lady drinking a tiny bottle of yogurt as a dinner beside the cardboards came across my mind. I wanted to behave different today. I asked my friend to stay there for a second and searched for my wallet from the bottom of my bag. After less than a minute I found my wallet and turned around to go back to the man, I felt as if I was back-stabbed by something.
As I approached the man with my wallet in one hand, the man got away from me faster and faster. All of a sudden he rolled the cart under his body with unbelievable speed, and headed to a narrow alley where nobody was walking. I looked around me to find the reason why he bunged off suddenly. Everything seemed so normal. People was walking by twos and threes, and I was approaching the man from quite far distance so he must not had ran away from me. Then a gray van written ‘PATROL, intensive control’ caught my eyes. A few people in uniform unloaded from the van and walked towards the direction where I was standing, scanning the overall street slowly. When I looked back the alley where the man fled to, I saw the man’s back far away, running fast with two intact legs, and a cart and hollow, dirty rubber pants abandoned behind.
Before I could even realize what just happened, my friend called me as she slapped my back. I couldn’t say anything to my friend, asking me if it was my first time meeting a trickster like him, and grumbling that she cannot help poor ‘looking’ people because of men playing cheap like him. I couldn’t repress my anxiousness towards ourselves, not even able to feel sympathy when we find a poor soul, buried under huge suspicion when I heard my friend grumble. We need to live our life with more honesty and augustness. I believe that although luck do exist in this world, the most important thing is the effort we make in order to accomplish our goals, and the honesty we keep during all the way of it. People should make a fair endeavor to be dignified of his own self. In a society, faith between every members of the relationship is significant. These days, that faith’s bottom had dropped out and now we went to the length of not reaching a hand of help to poor people. This faith should be piled up once again, and with the faith burried under, we will be able to build up other warm emotions and behaviors above it.
After I came back home, I plugged my cell-phone to the charger and lied down on the floor. Miserable shape of the man running away brashly came up in my mind as I closed my eyes. In my vision the man ran and ran till he totally disappeared from my sight, but the vestige of his falsehood was casted behind. I wondered what would have been in his mind when he ran away so desperately from the patroller. That weekend was the last time I saw that man in the same downtown. He might have changed his base city, but I hope he decided to live with honestness, and contribute just a little bit to a world with faith between individuals.
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