For those who've been asking, he was there again today, in his customary position in front of the Presbyterian Church (like he never left). His dark blue blanket was stretched from his lap to the milk crate in front of him so he looked like larvae. And on the milk crate was the beat-up old tray for his collection of coins.

I guessed that last bit. From the bus window I couldn't see the tray. I don't walk those streets anymore (lately the past has been catching up with me).

He was resting one elbow on his knee and in his raised hand was a cigarette. His hair was longer, pushing from the sides of his head in pepper and grey.

He was looking philosophical and I was feeling philosophical, having composed in my head that morning on the bus a thesis entitled Loneliness: Unfinished.

As usual he was implacable. It must be my imagination that finds camaraderie in his solitary solidity. He is perfectly at ease (how can he be?), he is perfectly whole (isn't everyone, from the outside?), he is perfectly still. Still. And still there.

I've explained I rarely see him anymore because I don't work in the building opposite the church. It's true, I don't. But it's a little more than that, I admit. I avoid that place now.

I avoid the streets around the place I used to work because you know what, here's a poorly-kept secret, I hated that place. Though I found cheer in the neighbouring strip parlour with its tiny women staff (if you trained insects to wear stilettos they would look the same, only the insects wouldn't have such expressionless faces) and its unabashed clientele (there was this one old man who could be seen skittering lock-kneed out the door of the parlour several times a week. He was so old his eyes were half-shut from the decades of tugging on his lids. He was so old his skin looked more like paper. No, like paper if paper could have dandruff. He was SO old!).

I found cheer in the gambling den next door to that and the *other* gambling den that was eventually turned into a Korean kitchen (and always the smell of laundry in the alley in between, such a clean, damp smell for those grotty, dank streets). I found cheer in the craziness of the people I worked with, all their intelligence and pride under seige, all their skills snubbed, all their dark humours shared (in whispered conversations and grinning denunciations, 'I will raze this place to the ground' was the message, what a pity no one did). What an awful place.

I hope it rots.

I avoid those streets. I catch the bus right through and it's like catching a bus through a sewer, a slum, a place marked Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter. An awful, lonely place with dirty streets. But I don't mean 'a sewer' because of the homeless guys or the insects in their stilletos or that old dude with the paper skin. I mean it's a sewer because I can't bring myself to return -- not to the place or the person I used to be (you can never go back, you know, either you've changed or the place has or you've been misremembering this whole time, and which is the biggest tragedy?).

Loneliness: Unfinished.

It's not smog in the air over that part of town, it's the stench of survival, it's the dust and decay of fallen skin, the ash of brimming rage that litters the corners of the street. I would raze that place to the ground -- if I could bring myself to touch it.

But the spidey-loving bum, he stays and stays. He has the fortitude for that. Alone against the landscape, the old philosopher. From his vantage point on street level, eyes busy but unfocussed, all the vicissitudes of men and forgotten women are as nothing. Still nothing.

And the bus moved on.