"What ?"
"Why 'd you let yourself go?"
"What do you mean?"
"You don't look like someone who should be living on the streets."
"Who does?"
"You're smart, pretty, kind...yet you've let yourself beg for a living. Why?"
Rea dropped the burger she was holding back into its box and stared into the distance.
"What makes you think I let myself go?" She asked Joel. He was sitting across from her in the restaurant, barely eating his own food. "What if this is the actual me?"
"This?" He scoffed, pointing up and down at her rags.
"You're looking at the wrong me. That's the problem. I'm referring to the me that doesn't conform to what society calls normal. The me that doesn't have to prove anything to anyone."
He chuckled and looked around, as if to see if anyone else had heard her. Many people had been occassionally shooting glances at them all afternoon. It was an interesting sight ; a meticulously dressed gentleman sitting with a...uhm, a woman who looks like a walking trash can.
"What happened to you?"
She shook her head and looked away.
Her eyes caught sight of an old man sitting on the pavement across the street. He was paralysed from the waist down and could barely distinguish between a tree and a person.
"That's Mr T. We call him Mr T, I don't know his full name. He is smarter than a lot of proffessors," she said, as if she hadn't heard his question.
Joel turned and looked at the 70-something old man, seemingly enjoying singing while waving a small wooden plate.
"Mr T was a builder back in the day, but everything turned around for him the day he fell off a roof, breaking his spine. The young wife he could no longer take care of left him for someone else. Well, at least that's what I've heard. I never got to ask him coz everytime I was around him he was always so positive and so hopeful that I just couldn't bring up a gloomy topic. He encouraged me to leave the streets...told me there was a whole better life waiting for me out there. I went for two straight days with nothing to eat at some point and he gave me all the money he'd earned that week. Every single coin. I refused to take it but he was not gonna have that. It was $7.53 and it was all he had. He gave it all." A tear trickled down her right cheek. She quickly rubbed it off. "People like him; sir, they didn't let themselves go."
He gasped deeply. She was shutting him out. Whenever he tried looking into her eyes she'd blink the gaze away and just...shut him out.
"Why do you care so much, anyway?" She asked him, offhandedly. "And don't tell me it's because you go to church, coz 90% of the people that've passed me by in the street do too."
"Somebody has to care."
She laughed. It was so loud it made heads turn. Those that'd labelled her as mentally-disturbed upon initially seeing her had their judgements confirmed.
"I don't think what I said was that funny."
"Wasn't funny at all. I'm laughing coz if I hadn't experienced what I did at church today, that statement would've made me walk away from here right now. Everyone that was supposed to 'care' left me when I needed them the most. And all those years I spent searching, wondering, dying...sleeping on hard concrete underneath a cardbox, still nobody 'cared'. A few have attempted to, but they ended up leaving as well. So, I'm sorry, but I don't need you to care because you feel somebody has to, okay?"
Joel clenched his jaw and then leaned forward towards her.
"Rea, I know you."
"Excuse me?"
" You are Rea Mashanya from Gata, i know you. We practically grew up together; went to creche, grade 1, 2 and 3 together. Remember?"
Her eyes widened in a blend of surprise and shock, transfixed on him. She didn't blink this time. And he caught a glimpse of the thick veil that covered the window to her soul.
Joel had seen Rea two weeks back, outside a bakery on the outskirts of the city. He was about to walk on by when his attention was drawn to a peculiar rosary she had hung around her neck. It was a unique kind; with neon-green coloured beads and a yellow thread. He had continued to walk on, but the image of the homeless lady with the rosary resembling the ones he and his classmates had received as gifts in grade 3, stayed on his mind. And so when he saw her again that day, in church, he knew he couldn't just walk on this time.
It was as if one ventricle of his heart stopped contracting the moment he got close enough to recognise she was the girl that used to draw butterflies on his face with mulberry-stained hands.
"You...you know me?"
"Yeah, and your family. You lived two houses away from us."
She looked down and buried her face into her hands. Her mind could not believe she had been sitting across from her long-lost childhood friend the whole time. Joel Mataga? As in muddy-face Joel?
"Look, Rea," he said, removing her hands from her face. "I've not just been looking at you all afternoon, I've been looking for you. Where is the real you?"
"You know a 5-year old, Joel. Not a 25-year old."
"What happened to you? Please, tell me what happened."
She got up from her seat, her eyes beginning to swell up.
"Thank you for the meal."
She took the food she hadn't eaten and walked out before he could say anything. He watched her through the window, give the food to Mr T across the street and then she strode away; disappearing at a corner.
....
