TRUMP WINS the headline reads on my phone, in all capital letters as if the words weren’t loud enough.
My eyes glaze over, and a short, sharp exhale leaves my nose. I’m not ready to begin my work day or to make my coffee and do my stretches. Just five more minutes.
My chin rests on my pillow, shortening my neck, as my belly lays on my mattress and I watch the street in front of me through my window at eye level. Beams of sun stream into my first floor apartment, elevated off street level to provide me a discrete vantage point. I squint my eyes. People slowly pace outside the café next door on phone calls, as they do, or rush by to catch the bus which stops every seven minutes as it always does. The city continues its hum, but at a frequency less familiar, as we tip-toe around our new reality.
The world is burning. Genocide is rife. Palestine isn’t free. 47 million people are hungry in the U.S. A trans child was murdered in Texas. Fentanyl is injected into veins outside my door. Suicide is a leading cause of death for children under 18, next to firearms. School walls are crumbling. Corruption lives rampant in City Hall. My neighbor’s home was burned down as part of a targeted hate crime. Women can’t make choices over their own bodies. A rapist now, once again, runs the Fed.
Fucking bullshit, I think to myself.
A car pulls over outside my apartment, a toddler crying as the door opens. The car doesn’t wait long after the mother unloads her bags and straps her daughter into a stroller before driving off. The mother, with long lavender hair, pushes the stroller to the other side of the sidewalk and rushes back to grab the remaining plastic bags on the curb.
She stands with her piles, her daughter’s wails echoing through the quiet street. Eyes of those walking by peer at the mother in both sympathy and judgement, then embarrassment as they dart their stares away. The toddler’s cries and screams are steady through the scene.
“Shut the fuck up,” I hear the mom say, not even under her breath. The toddler cries louder, raspy with fear.
I flatten myself further into my mattress, watching the daughter, adrenaline tingling in my stomach and arms.
“I swear to fucking god, shut up, shut up, shut up. You don’t think I’m hungry too? I will fucking hit you. I swear I will fucking hit you if you don’t stop crying. Do you want to be sent away to live with Grandma? Because if you keep crying I will fucking send you away and it will be your fault.”
Shit’s already bad enough, dull and aching, lofty and prevalent. But here is an injustice so acute I can see it, I can hear it outside my front door. I’ll intervene, I’ll do it, I’ll fucking do it.
Two women who work at the rehab center across the street stand at the corner near the fire hydrant, whispering to each other, assessing the situation, like me discerning when, if, and how to intervene. They approach the woman and her daughter with gentle voices.
“Hi. We just wanted to check on you. Are you okay?” they ask the mother. One of them waves and smiles at the daughter in her stroller, an attempt to disarm and normalize the situation, the feeble white lies we tell children to protect them.
“No. No, I’m not okay,” the mother’s voice cracks and then begins picking up pace. “Some social worker just dropped me off here and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t eaten and she hasn’t eaten and I’ve been going through a really hard time and I just need to get a ride. I just need to call an Uber. Fuck where do I go?”
My linen sheets feel scratchy, and my tempurpedic mattress a bit too soft. Who am I to be in bed on a weekday morning? I could be her, and she could be me. Whether or not I will find myself with my belongings on the sidewalk is determined in a major way only by circumstances of luck, nothing more. The pain and the hurt that’s passed down through generations, nestled between tendons and braided into muscles’ fibers, has placed each of us here, the mother and I, and now the daughter too. What have I done to deserve this privilege?
The two women from the rehab center nod and listen, their brows furrowed with concern, assessing the situation and informing their next move, as they are trained to do, as they do everyday. I’m glad they’re here.
“Do you need help? Can we get you and your daughter something to eat or a ride somewhere?" one of them asks.
“I don’t want help.”
The mother immediately continues, "I don't know what I’m going to do. I’m not okay,” indiscernible if she was mumbling to herself or giving the offer a second thought.
The two rehab workers and I are granted an uncomfortable conclusion: this mother and her daughter are not okay. We can do nothing about it. I could have at least offered her a glass of water.
