i didn’t know if they were alive…

there were bodies everywhere. sprawled across sidewalks, slumped against buildings, lying beneath makeshift shelters, surrounded by shopping carts, broken bicycles, wooden pallets, and whatever else people had assembled into something resembling a home.

i couldn’t tell whether they were sleeping, intoxicated, unconscious, or dead.

and i was scared shitless.

i’d never seen a dead body before, and i desperately didn’t want my first encounter with one to happen on an ordinary sidewalk in los angeles. i remember trying not to stare, yet my eyes kept searching for the slightest indication of life: the rise and fall of a chest, a twitch of the hand, anything that might reassure me someone was still breathing.

what disturbed me almost as much as the possibility of death was the apparent indifference surrounding it.

how the hell could people simply walk past bodies lying in the street without knowing, or seemingly caring, whether those people were dead or alive?

traffic moved. businesses opened. conversations continued. the city carried on while human beings lay motionless along its sidewalks. i couldn’t reconcile how something so profoundly unsettling to me could appear so ordinary to everyone else.

these were somebody’s mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. people with entire histories and lives extending far beyond the circumstances in which i encountered them.

**how had we designed a society in which another human being could become so disconnected from care that their very survival was left to the speculation of strangers?**

i stood there in skid row, newly displaced myself, confronting a reality i couldn’t explain and suffering i didn’t know how to address.

i didn’t have an answer. but that question would follow me for years, eventually intersecting with a life i was struggling to rebuild and ideas i’d carried since childhood.

to understand how i arrived on those sidewalks, i have to begin much earlier.

with a little boy in buffalo, a shopping cart that looked like a race car, and a hungry stranger whose hand was so large that all i could hold was one of his fingers.