Once, I had a chance encounter with a person whom I’ll never forget. I was walking to the playground and thinking about how easy it is to remember and how hard it is to forget when I saw her. She was lying on the ground, opaque garbage bags offering the slightest bit of comfort. She was crying.

I watched her cry for a minute. I don’t know why- I probably looked like a crazy stalker, standing there awkwardly on the dirty cement. Maybe to some I looked like a philosopher, silently watching this women cry as I contemplated my life choices at the mere age of eight.

Her tears were weak, dripping tirely down her greased face. A pink splotch outlined her wrinkling cheek bones, the kind of birthmark that some would say is a good omen and yet the beholder always knows that it is not. I have one too, right on my neck like a scar of someone beheaded in a past life. I wonder if she noticed.

And yes, by this time she too was watching me, through missing eyelashes and eyes that seemed to have a deep deep depth to them, but then again who was I to judge. I stood, waves of people passing around me, and it was almost as if we were touching.

I stood and I thought of how easy it is to put someone in a box. I thought about the box I would place her in, one of drugs and alcohol, hard times and depression. One of cold nights spent in a soggy cardboard shelter. Kids, maybe, but they were long gone and now it was just her and she was alone. Maybe that was all that mattered.

I stood and I looked at her, really looked at her, and in my peripheral vision I watched as her box shredded into tiny pieces. It fell away until all I could see was her. I wondered if anyone had ever saw that. I stood and I realized what I had never known: we are all the same.

We are all people, walking through life uncertain and unprepared, battling hardships and finding happiness and slowly watching that happiness disappear. I realized that there is truly no before, no after, there is only a now with different parts and auras. I realized that even though some people never lose their happiness, even though some don’t live in the streets of what could have been, it doesn’t really matter, because at the end we are all human and the only end we know is death. Somehow, I found that beautiful.

In that moment, the strangest thing happened: slowly, I looked her in the eyes and I smiled, a sad sort of smile that also hints at the truth, a smile that must have looked pretty bizarre on my chubby young face.

And she smiled back.

After that I ran to the playground and I never did say anything, not even a hello. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had. Still, I found something in myself that day, learned something about life, and for that I will never forget the women in the street.