Hopelessness

I wonder if anyone has this feeling. If anyone ever sees it or worries the way I do.
One thing I know a lot of people will have noticed is the amount of homeless people or 'lost souls' there are in Brighton. There are people at their peak, top if their game and clever intellectuals, but there are the lowest of the low too. Some of them chose their paths, and others were placed there through actions that were not their own. Abuse, cruelty, losing homes and family, abandonment.
But one thing that they say in Brighton is that 'people here don't hurt each other, they hurt themselves.' It is a place of people falling in pits they have made for themselves. Spiralling down into their very own chaos. But those are often the artists and the deep thinkers, not the ones you see walking the streets alone. Not the tired, roughened boy your age approaching you for money for a coffee, with a look on his face that says its over.
Today that boy came to me at Victoria station. I was on the phone to my boyfriend at the time, I was caught off guard and I dismissed him, something a young girl does naturally when she's not expecting someone to approach her. He had a woollen hat on, baggy jeans, a fairly well kept black coat and a scruffy teenagers shoulder bag. He looked like someone had cared, but maybe they didn't anymore, and he was preserving what was left of this memory. His eyes begged me. His voice was weak as if he didn't know what to even say anymore. As if he already knew the end result. And all I could think off when I got off the phone and looked behind me in the distance to his shadowed figure dragging his feet from person to person with no prevail, was a heavy and sickening weight in my heart.

Hopelessness.

And I hadn't cared when he needed someone. And neither had anyone else.

How long would he stay there? Would he leave? Go home to someone? Is someone waiting for him? Would he be reunited with a loved one? Is he loved?

I never got a name, or a reason for the desperation in his voice.

And you know what scared me the most? He was my age. He could have been my brother. Maybe a school friend. Maybe someone I spoke to one day at a party years ago. He is anyone we know and worry for every day.

We are stuck in our bubbles. I have gotten so used to trying to defend from letting anyone I don't know get in that when someone needs someone I naturally panic and dismiss them. I had change in my purse. I could have stopped his hunt right there, maybe given him enough for a sandwich too.

Yeah, maybe he was a fraud. This is something we all worry about when giving to people. But you know the good from the bad. That is what our gut is for. And he looked genuine.

I felt upset to tears that no one had given him anything. I know I had behaved badly, but seeing everyone else do the same worried me.

I'm scared for our generation, I'm scared for young people falling down the wrong path because no one cared.

My boyfriend told me a story that chilled my heart, he had overheard a young girl of about 16 talking to some homeless men on the street saying she had run away from home, seeking guidance from them. My head filled with fear on hearing this. Maybe no one else had helped her and this was her last resort. Maybe she herself thought this was the only solution for her from the start.

We can all work to just try and listen for a few moments longer to people who come to us for help. You may not want to give, but I just can't take the dismissal anymore.
We must change.

AKC x