Ailsa sat alone on a park bench, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of her mind, and thoughts, doubts and dreams.  Pigeons surrounded her, in a semi-circle; birds dirty with grey and white, filthy with a type of motion and action that she couldn’t recognize or comply with, though she tossed the crumbs of her morning donut to them.  The donut was all she had, she bought it with the pennies and nickels and dimes that passerbys' so graciously dropped into her coffee mug, as she sat outside of the local bakery.  There was one of her homes, one of her mansions, her cabins in the forest, composed of a cardboard box laid out flat; a towel half-saturated with morning and afternoon and evening rains that found their ways to the towel through the cracks of the sidewalk; a pile of children’s clothes that she used for a pillow, that she thought nothing of.  Some of the pigeons stood idle, their heads buried deep within their necks, as goes the inhuman action that they perform to remain warm, to be alone, or for people to earn the right to call them birds; some walked over the gravel, walking in circles, rectangles, and many other shapes in which points are connected by lines, as the park’s floor stood cold as a vast plane of Geometry where anything could happen, in the land of the homeless, in the land free of rules, of heart, of the mundane and supposed.  This other dimension existed, where the homeless, and people that possessed jobs, homes, and rituals, passed each other; often without acknowledgement, often with a form of discernment (on both sides of the spectrum), often without the acknowledgement of the possibility that these two worlds could, should, and one day may possibly would, or possibly wouldn’t, combine into one world, where the homeless would be able to join the unhomeless, if they wanted, and the unhomeless would want to join the homeless, if they wanted.  Ailsa thought of these possibilities often as she saw these other people, busy on their cell phones, hurrying to catch the train or bus.  She knew her type; they gathered at local soup kitchens, they exchanged an air of silent pride.  She knew the other type.  But she knew nothing of a one world.

Aisla looked up to the clouds.  They were blue wispy.  Yesterday they were blue and fluffy, like cotton.  She wanted to be able to tell to someone that the day before that they were square, and the day before that that the whole sky was composed of one huge cloud, and there wasn’t any blue to be seen, that that part of the atmosphere of Earth had disappeared for the day.  She imagined that she was the head of a business, or a company, where people went to work every weekday, and sat in cubicles, typed on keyboards, went to meetings, took lunch breaks, and talked at the water cooler.  Her employees would  come to her office, which would have a huge window overlooking the lake, bookshelves filled with books she’d already read; with worried faces and stumbling words, and she’d say, “Don’t worry about it, look outside, the sky is full of square clouds!  Take the day off and take your family out!  Go to the movies!  Go to the park!  Spend a lot of money on your kids!  Buy them new IPhones!  The IPhone6, that is the new IPhone, right?”  And Aisla’s coworkers would listen to everything that she would say because she would be their boss.  For a company.  Where people worked.  Every weekday, like people do.  But right now, Aisla hardly received any looks from any of these people.  They seemed to be too engrossed in their own lives, too stuck in what was going on with them to see what was going on with her or her fellow homeless people. 

She had to talk to them at soup kitchens.  Her and her fellow homeless people would stand in lines, or sit in folding chairs in musky old church halls, next to water fountains that hadn’t worked for years, waiting for a meal where they would be fed with course after course after course: soup, bread, veggies, fruit, a main dish, more bread, juice, coffee, milk, desserts donated by bakeries or Starbucks at the end of the day, and more, depending on the time of year.  Aisla and her fellow hungry church hall dwellers would stand, idle and quiet, waiting, knowing they would be fed well soon, in such a way as to share a sense of gratitude to the servers when they were about to be served to.  Silence and graciousness were what she exposed.  Every once in a while there would be someone in line who would be arrogant, who would demand more food than everyone else, who the volunteers would just smile to, scoop up some corn kernels for from the aluminum serving trays, and plop it on the white paper plates, but everyone in line always felt it.  There was nothing that could be done, because there wasn’t enough of a connection between the two types.  Aisla just took it and grimaced. 

As Ailsa just took it and grimaced when she realized she wouldn’t have any money for lunch.  There would be a soup kitchen that night at the church a mile and a half away, though.  She would bring back a loaf of bread to give to the pigeons that night.  The bench would keep her safe.  And sometimes safety is all you have.