So today we met some our friends at the park by my house. Loren had the shakes pretty bad. I asked him what was wrong and tried to get him to eat. He wouldn't eat anything but a couple small bites that I practically forced on him. He told me later that he didn't want to eat because he would throw it up. He didn't have enough alcohol in his body. "I'm a fool," he told me many times. His dad died at age 44 from cirrhosis of the liver. Loren is 38.
He told me a lot of things. He saw Tombstone on TV a while ago. He saw the scene where the people dressed up to go to a funeral. He watched them lower the casket into the ground and he remembered his fathers funeral. "I don't want to do that to my family." He spent a night in the hospital with his father when he was dying and saw his abdomen distend before his eyes.
He remembered when he first started living on the streets. He hated it at first. There weren't any resources. He didn't know how people lived. He called this the first stage. The second stage set in when he got used to it. And finally, in the third stage, he had begun to like it. He told Nik and I he has the opportunity to get treatment. He was fed up with himself for accepting the life he had, so I asked, "Is there a fourth stage?"
"Death." I felt my body freeze. And after a pause, "Death...Jail...A bad accident."
I was hoping he would say, "Change" or "Getting into the respite center." He knows there's help available to him. He just mentioned a way out! But death seemed more likely.
How disgusting! How beautiful! How honored and humbled I was to hear what he had to say. When people open up to you, show you their open wounds, you should recognize that you are being honored.
He talked about all the beautiful things he had seen in this county. A lightning bolt that shook the windows of a house and the thick hail that followed seconds later. A sunset when be clouds burst and the sunlight shot through. Four rainbows at once during El Nino seen through a jail window.
A lot of the time he had tears in his eyes. And another homeless friend gave us each a tangerine that he and Loren had worked together to pick.
