A man sprawled on frozen concrete, draped in blankets of grey, lay directly behind us.
Like good, little, pedestrians we waited for the green man to flash, allowing us to walk away.
My friend twisted his neck and looked at the man while continuing to talk.
His eyes scanned the man.
I scanned him, scanning the man.
The man on the ground was a calamity.
It physically hurt to see him lying there.
Sleeping out in the icy night air.
Unappetising, white-bread sandwiches and cheap bottles of water were the man's only companions on a bustling Friday night.
The man seemed to be sound asleep, if that was humanly possible.
I thought about him deeply, and decided I did not like the man being there.
Why was he on the side street running off the main street of our city?
Was he poor? Evil? Neither? Both?
His squalor made us - society at large - a collective, laughing-stock.
His maligned existence in such a terrible state of disrepair was a horror.
A horror that made one feel ill, like one had eaten something rotten while downing expensive drinks at an upmarket cocktail bar.
It hurt to witness such a cold, unkept, homeless man abandoned on the grey corner.
He just lay there awkwardly positioned on a cardboard mattress with those horrible, ill-fated, crumpled sandwiches made out of the most awful, unnutrutious, white-bread available.
I hated the man.
He was unignorable.
An unignorable symbol of our modern societies failure to glue everyone together with a true sense of shared humanity that transcended the tyranny of economic imperatives in our global fish-bowl of a world.
The man was a blackhole. Of our collective human darkness. Hiding in plain sight.
I was overwhelmed by nausea. Can you blame me?
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