A man on the street asks me if I want to be saved, his hands clutching a coverless book, the visible pages rusty with age and damp. His eyes are wide with a shine that looks like it belongs in the sky just on the cusp of a summer storm and not in the eyes of anything human or otherwise.
Normally I would walk by anyone trying to offer me what I do not believe in – and I must assume he is speaking of some religion or other–but I stop and tell him I would love to be saved.
He looks at me a moment, almost, it seems, in shock, that someone has stopped; am I imagining that he was already moving onto the next passerby before he had finished asking me, so sure was he of a dismal? I can see he is replaying my reply in his head, searching it for mockery or sarcasm – perhaps even my use of the word ‘love’–before concluding that neither is present and I meant what I said, which I did, surprising myself with those words almost as much as I am surprised that I stopped. Yes, I do indeed want to be saved, and have wanted to be for some time, consciously unaware as I may have been right up until the moment I was asked by this man on the street. Or, if not saved, at the very least, made secure, for the past few years of my life have been spent adrift as I move from apartment to apartment every time the rent is raised, each one smaller than the one before, and from jobs every time the wage is lowered, both of these things happening with ever-increasing rapidity. Who would not want to be saved from a life like that, even if the offer is from a man met on the street? Who would be foolish enough to risk losing such a chance, no matter from where that chance might be originating? This man on the street, despite his battered book and shining eyes, is respectably dressed–possibly even more so than me in my dark hoody and faded jeans – and his manner of speaking seems almost cultured, like an off-duty actor speaking in their everyday voice, the sweep and flow of projection absent but hinted at with every second or third word. Nor does he give off the fumes of alcohol, or–bar those shining eyes any suggestion of drugs taken. At the most I would say he is a man touched, perhaps, by some soft madness, but nothing dangerous, nothing to tip a person’s natural instinct into warnings of danger.
And then he smiles, this man on the street with the shining eyes, and in that smile I see something close to viciousness, a cruel decision made which will demand a cruel action to implement. Whatever stopped me vanishes in a moment and I walk away from him, my steps swift, my heart racing in my chest, expecting him at any moment to give chase. My now alerted instinct tells me that the salvation this man offers is one of pain and endings, and I do not need any help achieving the latter, for have I not considered it many times in the past few years, fleetingly, a way out of it all when it all finally–as I fear it must, for the human heart and mind surely have limits to their endurance–becomes too much?
But he does not follow, and eventually my steps slow and my heart regains its normal beat. I continue on in the life I am trying to live by simply surviving, any chance of being saved fluttering and fading behind me like an echo without an originating sound. I even laugh, a small, frail sound, more a release of abrupt fear than any humour, but a laugh all the same.
I cannot remember the last time I laughed. I find myself thankful that I stopped to speak to that man on the street, however brief it was. And while I do not feel saved or even secure, I feel the weight of despair that is a permanent presence in my chest lessen somewhat, like a breath coming easier than the one before with the fragile possibility that the next one might be easier still.
