An Interlude, A Little Leak of Light

Hilarious wisdom, the power of the right story at the right time from the right person and surrendering to vulnerability.

Do you ever just feel like you’re being made to sit in your own shit and look hard at all the ways you’ve failed others and yourself?

That part, as some of my friends say.

2022.

Yesterday, feeling tender and opened by a difficult series of conversations, I ran into, as I do every day, the local character selling CDs, drawings, freestyles and, more so than anything, his colorful personality on the corner of Broadway and Prince — which is often funny and often aggressive and often both at once.

It’s hard to explain this to non-women, but being a woman, I often find it necessary to make allies of local men. If I can pass by and offer a pound or a nod, it means I am on the side of the protected rather than the harassed. I have earned some respect. I am a friendly neighbor, not a threat, nor a conquest. It is a survival tactic I’ve learned having lived in this brutal city for twenty years and it has served me well for what it is.

But sometimes the gift runs deeper, and often it takes time to emerge. In this case, four and a half years. Then boom, from out the sky: a message from the universe in the mouth of an unlikely prophet, a real live kismet.

The artist noticed the stitches below my eye and exclaimed, what happened! It was showing off its wound but also, I assume, it was made even more red and puffy from a morning of emotional release. When I shared about the bike accident, the artist opened his mouth to point out half a jaw robbed of its teeth. The rawness of the naked gums shocked me.

The gesture was so bold and so vulnerable at once: see me, see where I am missing whole parts of myself.

I learned the artist got into a skateboard accident and unable to procure work, ended up in a homeless shelter. Everyone is struggling he told me, along with many other words. The ensuing conversation altered my perspective.

See how my friend with weed just showed up right on time? One example of many. Trust, he said!

I laughed a lot. At moments I saw his rage at the world and though it made me uncomfortable, I couldn’t entirely blame him. I saw myself in him in some ways. If I am to be honest, even the pieces I do not admire. Maybe especially.

My sister roasts me for my tendency to make friends with, perhaps an unkind word, the marginal — folks who make their lives on the streets, outside the typified and acceptable paths of societal mandates.

But isn’t that where such potent wisdom lives, against all odds or “better judgement?”

Isn’t that how we discover how amazingly flawed and human we are, just little fish in the sea of SoHo streets floating still in the coral reef of tourists and office workers and retail shops and mango sellers talking real shit and asking for nothing in return?

Isn’t it true that sometimes a stranger can deliver a message so on point that it shifts the quality of the light?

Look up towards the surface of the water, little fish. Watch how the sun is a spot of beckoning light, wavering through the lens of water, which the fish cannot understand, for it is her air.

It need not be more than a moment, but do take the moment when on offer.

As much as I try, and I do try, the lesson that keeps coming back to knock on my door and ask if I’ve absorbed it is: are you ready to release your need to obsessively fix? What if you just sit in what hurts? What if you just allow it to rush over you like a waterfall? To admit there is pain, if only to yourself?

Crab without its shell, and that is not me complaining, that is just me being what I am right now: vulnerable, tender meat feeling around the gritty sand with claws ready to pinch, in anxious search of its new home.

I am a jaw half emptied of its teeth!

I want to hide but I can’t! Everyone can see the inside my mouth, all of those obvious craters where my mistakes once were!

Might as well open up wide.

Come look, come look.

I think you might recognize my mouth as a mirror.