Drunken Loutings

To that drunkard who said and did louty things. I see you lashing out at the world so the world hurts you right back. most people react to you accordingly and throw curses or angry glares your way when you act like a drunken asshole. It is what you have become a master at. But I see through you to spot a mechanism of instinct and survival: dog eat dog. This is what you have come to know of a reality, and perhaps at the root, you may be right.

Well Sir, I may frustrate you when I treat you with quiet dignity despite your hostility. I feel it's pain that speaks through the lashing out. You became lost a long time ago, perhaps & this is what is left, your Survival self. I see many people who make their livelihoods out of survival, becoming Survivalists, more than merely survivors. You show your agency that way and to that I pay my respects, in earnest.

Although you may not be shown much respect day to day, please do not abuse my kindness, I do not advocate violence nor am I trying to justify yours. I am no better from you and do not hold myself at such an esteem, but I do try to understand where you might be coming from, and counter your behaviour with kindness if i can (but I'm not perfect either). Do not abuse the gentle who cross your path, for sometimes they are but few in between. Do not confuse me with a doormat that wants to be yelled at, purged onto or kicked.

When you swatted my arm what hurt the most was my heart. I felt a bit shocked, then confused as to how you did not see I would be no threat to you when I asked if you were ok. In a fit of misdirected anger, you purposefully knocked the drink out of my hand and though my arm gave a sting, my feelings hurt more somehow. At that moment, in my naivete, it seemed that you had broken the contract between human beings, the one that I have come to know whereby there are no perpetrators, no victims, no abuse, no attacking, no retaliation without any 'just cause'. It's an attempt at instilling a sense of order from chaos in an irrational world, at least in theory, so sometimes I clutch to it.

Then I realized you & I did not share the same 'rules'. We could not. We share this world but are somehow planets apart. Your rules are of survival, hand to mouth and moment to moment living, subsistence, where each 'Survivalist' has a tactic: some try to disappear, some to recoil, some to escape, some to lash out, some to bark louder so the world does not bite first. We each do what we have to do and we do it with the best tools we have been given.

Still, I crossed your path & learned a humbling lesson from you. I modestly hope is that if you were not taking lessons from anyone that day (as is your perogative), that you at least had an exchange with a stranger who for one minute saw you, the human being. I know it may not be much of anything to you, but it is what I was willing to give to a stranger that day.

Wherever you are, I hope your needs are met for this day. I hope the chill doesn't find you too deeply and I wish you some solace in a cup of tea or a bottle of your choice. I wish you a quiet moment where you feel like you might have felt back in a time when there was a little happiness somewhere. Perhaps it was short, perhaps someone had cared for you. I wish for you a warm place somewhere in your memory, of your past if need be, if there isn't any room for such things in your present.

I wish you small moments of light should you need them, fleeting, flying, swatting back at you, perhaps, whatever love looks like to you.


Sincerely,
just a stranger