He's Gone...

The homeless man whom I had been seeing on my bike ride to work every day has dissappeared. For the last year (or two? not sure), he had been sitting on the same patch of curb every time I rode past. Other times of the day I would walk by and he would still be there, apparently rooted in place. When the weather was wet, I sometimes noticed a moldy smell emanating from him as I walked by. I had no idea where he went at night or when it rained, and even on rainy days, I would sometimes see him sitting on his curb, holding an umbrella over his head.
Occassionally, somebody would stop their car to give him food: I suspect that he had a few people helping him. When his jacket grew so tattered that it barely stayed on him, he acquired a new one. The umbrella appeared soon after the rains set in.
This fellow always had a shopping cart parked nearby. It was filled with what appeared to be tarps and and garbage bags. Towards the end of his stay on the curb, he added a cheap folding camp chair, which made him look much more comfortable than he had during the many months when he'd just been sitting on the curb.
The few times I saw him walking, he did so with a pronounced limp. I often wondered how somebody as physically frail as he seemed to be could survive both the cold, rainy weather and the more aggressive and physically-intimidating homeless types who inhabit the nearby park.
One morning I noticed that he had acquired some scrapes on his face, as if he had tripped, fallen, and not been able to catch himself. Or maybe somebody had beat him up. I wondered. The odd thing that day was that the usual collection of homeless people was completely missing from the park, and it wasn't as if the weather had turned bad and driven them all to shelter. It was almost spooky: as little as I care for the obnoxious drunks and drug addicts who often litter our park, I have grown used to seeing them around, and it was strange to not see any of them around that day.
Many times I considered approaching him and saying more than just the usual "hello," maybe offering to get him something. Do you need any clothes? Would you like a sandwhich? But I never did. I think I was afraid of him, afraid of his needs, afraid that they would overwhelm me, that he would want to be my buddy, that I would feel responsible for him. My co-dependent boundries shook at the very thought of all of this: to have good boundries requires much energy from me, so I tend to maintain a really wide buffer zone.
He is gone, but his shopping cart still remains. It has been picked over by the park's other denizens, but very little has been taken. I'm sure anything of even the least little value had already been taken from him long ago, and that is probably how he survived--by flying (or sitting, in his case) under the radar. Until now, that is.
His folding chair stayed on the shopping cart for a while, neatly folded, down on the cart's bottom rack, where I often set (and forget) my yuppie beer at the grocery store.
Nowadays, I ride by the empty spot on the curb and the abandoned cart, and I feel like a little piece of me has gone missing. His old spot is the kind of place that you would never notice were it not for its history: it is a part of the everyday ugliness to which we are so accustomed that we no longer notice it: it is invisible to our conscious brains, but takes its toll deep down where we seldom notice what's happening. It is the only kind of place where a man like him would have been allowed to sit for more than a year.