despair.

so this has been a pretty eventful week. but i must discuss what struck me odd the most. saturday was C's birthday, so i treated her to an hour's massage in columbia. in route to the business establishment, we encountered a younggirl at a traffic light, bearing a sign that said she was homeless. i imagine she was begging; occam's razor.
what struck me was how young this girl was. she looked not a day over 17, at the most. destitute and drained is what exuded from her, but the thing that struck a chord in my heart like a pick to a guitar chord, was that her aura was that of emptiness; nothingness. didn't she have a family? or atleast loved ones? C said maybe it was her choice to be there, because if she was a runaway, the police would have already seized her.
my mind raced even more; what was she running from? abuse? drugs? parents? or could she have been like that man in the bio-pic, Into the Wild? was she a user? or a survivor merely surviving a harsh hand dealt by life? where has she traveled? has she made it far enough away from what she's running from? where is she going? why there?
she looked like a funky neo-hippie with an epic to divuldge. i wanted to unravel the wrinkles upon her face and disect every line, knowing what worry, what pain put it there.

a few blocks down the road were a group of fellow beggars. some old, some young. it struck a chord within me, though not nerely as possible as the first girl. i thought, 'is this a cult?' how judgemental of me. i do not know these individuals. i do not know their stories. and any fool fool knows that one must look past the cover to see what secrets a book beholds.

pure wonderment and fascination.