philadelphia, july 20

"I need you," a homeless man states plainly as I make the mistake of looking him in the eye while passing. He is holding a folder that could be his hospital papers, which, if I concede, he will show to me forlornly, urging me to help him out with his medical treatments for some rare disease of which I have never heard. Or perhaps it's a picture of his 17 children, who all live under the same cardboard roof on 63rd Street and eat uncooked Easy Mac for dinners, lining their tongues first with the cheesy powder before they bite down on the hard, tasteless noodles. Maybe it's just pages upon pages of poetry that he has scribbled down during his long nights in the subway station, accounts of how he discovered the meaning of life, how it has been whispered to him through street grates, shouted at him from the tops of skyscrapers.

...

It is not as though she was unhappy, although all signs would point to that conclusion; in particular, her shabby appearance and permanent scowl were not exactly becoming. But then again, she had never been a beautiful girl, had been born and raised exactly mediocre, brown hair, eyes the color of milky coffee, translucent skin that never tanned nor burned but merely stayed the same all year round as though in defiance of the sun. She liked, of course, long walks on the beach at sunset and a nice margarita, sugar-lined rim, on the rocks. Years ago, she had expressed dislike for the American Dream. "What a cliche," she had remarked, blowing cigarette smoke into the listless New Jersey summer-night air. This was years ago, when she had been 17, 18. When she had still been a dreamer, not yet desperate. Now she wanted a nice husband, maybe a dog. A wraparound porch and a pitcher of strawberry lemonade. Jazz music playing softly on the radio behind her. It was an attainable dream, she thought. One she deserved.