the strength it takes to be soft

does kindness really comes without cost?

I stood outside the mall holding a butter-yellow basketball, a mark towards my attempt of a healing journey for the nth time. It was the middle of another hot summer day, sweat pooling up in the five minutes I attempted to book a ride back. My screen lit up with tiny yellow icons moving on the gray lines of the map, brightness as high as it could go. I’m distracted by a voice, pleading and pitying, and I look down to see a girl. She is about ten, holding up vibrant colouring books against faded and torn clothes hanging on a bony, malnourished frame. Oiled, pigtailed hair. Huge eyes. She is asking me to give her the ball. For my brother, please. Please give the ball, akka. I grip it a little tighter, trying to form words that won’t crush the fragile, desperation look of hope on her face, somehow still not jaded by a cruel life. I mutter out a small no, and she clutches her books tighter. She is asking me for food now. White rice, specifically, pointing to the line of stalls opposite the towering structure of the mall. The signboards with brands bigger than the line-up of blue wrapped structures selling tea and cigarettes. At the end, one solitary shop with a menu hung up in laminated plastic. I sigh and follow her to the shop, letting out a warning to cross safely. I pay for her meal and she gives me a smile brighter than the yellow of my ball, standing on a little box to peek over the counter at the cooked white rice.

My ride’s finally booked and I’m repeating the OTP when one of the other kids loitering by the gate come up to me for food again. I look straight ahead, all my willpower focused on the road ahead, on the phone displaying my name as he enters the digits and the whole way through, I can feel his eyes on the back of my head, asking a silent why not me too?

It’d been a hard day, like most days of college are. The cold of the metro freezes my neon green shirts while I let the sleek black of my headphones jam over my tangled hair. I am listlessly scrolling my playlist, to once again play from the roster of the three songs I was obsessed with that week when I hear a tap on my shoulder followed by an excuse me. I push up my glasses to look at a gorgeous woman in a black burqa and shiny head-scarf looking at me. I smile at her: yes?. She leans forward and tells me my outfit’s cute. I let out a full teethed crooked smile, muscles straining, unused to the movement. I breathe out a thank you and she gets off the next station while I sit with a stupid grin on my face.

I’ve been on my own for a while. I commute to college, come back. Work, lie on my bed on most nights wondering if it’s gonna be this way for the rest of time. It is not that I’m alone, or that I crave some deeper human connection to open myself up again. I just wonder when a simple are you okay ? cracked my heart in two, had me ugly-sobbing. I just wonder when a stranger’s small smile felt intimate, loaded with something more than a passing kindness. I just wonder when a shared laugh ached away at my heart like a cup over-flowing. I just wonder when kindness became so scarce.

Lives. The lady yelling at me to move before pushing me into a bus already over-crowded. The professor who refused to listen why I was five minutes late, while my hand shook. The missed calls that remained unanswered. My roommate asking me to keep it down as I sobbed in a call. The half-hour spent with a shaking body on the wooden desk while behind me was laughter. The abrupt did I ask? to a story that ended before it could start. Lives.

Maybe she was in a hurry. Maybe she had a bad day. Maybe their lives got tangled up too far to call back, maybe she had a headache. Maybe they didn’t know how to ask me , maybe they were already over-whelmed to listen.

Sonder of the lives of the people, all with lives and hopes and dreams. Cruelty so much easier, to mirror back the knife twisting inside. Indifference so much easier, to pretend the heart ain’t aching for a little care. So much easier to be strangers uncaring and unkind.

What do we owe each other at the end but some love? Some solidarity, a hand extended, some sign of the great loves living in small hearts. Some sign that there is still a love to give back.

What do we owe each other but community ? At the end, who do we have but us, so must we absolve us of the inconvenience of caring? Of showing up and of sharing pains and pleasures, of letting hearts let be on the sleeve, to give back all the love you can.

It will always take strength to be gentle, to chose to not inflict back the pain smarting under your skin. It will always take strength to be kind when there is no reason to be, it will aways take strength to chose goodness when all is bleak and black. It will always take strength to be soft when nothing about life is.

Maybe it isn’t easy to give a love you yearned for all your life, maybe it isn’t easy to hand out the help you begged for, maybe it isn’t easy to stop the voice asking I deserved this too. That to give into this world a kindness you never got is unfair.

It is unfair.

But what choice do we have at the end ?

To once again take the plunge and believe in goodness, to be full of love and kindness and all things pure anyways. It won’t make much of a difference, I don’t know. It won’t suddenly morph the world into sunshine and rainbows but by God, if I can spare someone my pain, it’s maybe worth the ache of choosing my stupid heart a million times over.

I never said I make good decisions, anyways. But they are the right ones to me.

That is enough for a girl still living despite it all.

There’s enough pain already, I think.

With Love.

I hope when you need it, there’s someone to ask you: are you okay? .