As she slips the five bucks into my cup, I look up from the sidewalk and mumble, “God bless you.”  An exhilarating shock runs through me as I watch her saunter down the street, a cluster of bittersweet memories bursting upon my mind. My wife… That’s my wife… Was my wife.

No longer that distant figure on the charred landscape of my youth, no longer a nocturnal phantom haunting my tent under the overpass, but a person of flesh and blood, proof that I once lived and loved in this city that now recoils from my poverty and despair. I get to my feet and stumble after her as she window-shops, her hand gently pulling a young boy along. Over the last fifteen years I dreamed about her a lot… but not so much lately.

It’s bleak and chill, a biting wind blowing down the sidewalk and numbing my nose and lips, while deep in the leaden sky I hear the first rumblings of thunder. Filled with a feverish excitement, I follow ten paces behind, stopping when she does, watching every move of her body, captivated by her dazzling presence in my colorless world. She pauses at a shoe store with a casual sidelong look, then moves off again down the street. I pass by the same window and catch a clear reflection of myself in the glass. Christ, what a wreck! The wiry, grizzled beard can’t hide my hollow cheeks, nor the ripped hunting jacket my emaciation. Even if she recognized the decaying, sunken-eyed creature trailing her, what could she even say? Could she hide her revulsion behind a fake smile? Bury her disappointment beneath forced pleasantries?

It was a combative marriage from the start, my stubbornness endlessly defying her savage temper. She wanted a baby. I didn’t. She wanted me to stop drinking. I didn’t. She wanted me to quit my friends and stay home. I didn’t. That apartment, so cramped and cruddy, became the arena we tore each other apart in night after night, our faces bathed in sweat, our bodies caked with dust and blood: a cup shattering against the wall above my ahead, my Playstation flying out the window, the constant slamming of doors, numerous calls from the cops… In the end I crawled out of there on my hands and knees, unable to endure even one more confrontation, dropping out of her world and down into a darker, transient one.

Well, looks like you got your kid in the end. Fine boy. Hope he makes you happy. And is the sucker still in the picture? Poor bastard.

She stops at a crosswalk and I walk up behind her so close I can smell her perfume.

“You cold, hun?”

I freeze, my lips parting in a tiny gasp. Yes, I cry inside. Yes I’m so cold.

“Are ya, hun?”

She looks down at the boy, wiggling his little hand, but he just shakes his head. They move off across the street, while I follow instinctively, helplessly, flaming with nostalgia.

Christ, just to hear her call me hun once more would drop me to my knees right here in the street. The casually intimate gestures in the kitchen, the sweet taste of her lips, the tender shoulder rubs, the long nights wrapped in her soft flesh… Unbidden memories flood back, sweet but agonizing, carrying with them the reminder that it wasn’t all screaming and smashed cups. There was passion too. There was love too. It was real. And so was I… once. I existed, dammit. I had a life, a job, a wife, a Playstation.

She checks the menu outside the door of a restaurant, talks to the boy, then goes inside. I follow in an impulse of sentimentality, briefly basking in sweet laughter and drowsy heat, but the hostile look of an approaching waiter drives me back outside into the freezing street. I walk slowly by the window, watching her take the boy’s coat off and talk him through the menu, but they soon disappear behind the reflection of a ragged misfit.

Good luck to ya, darlin’. Don’t ever look back.

Her appearance has caused a strange disturbance deep inside me, a stark reminder that someone once loved me desperately and violently, so I buy a bottle of Scotch and traipse back to my tent, reaching the overpass just as it begins to pour. Forgotten and alone, I sit in my fishing chair and listen to the passing traffic, teeming rain and occasional roll of thunder, mourning the inexplicable collapse of my life, swallowing the Scotch quickly as a slew of fading, disjointed memories tumbles violently through my mind: the dismal string of failed relationships and embittered women, my downward spiral of drink and dissipation, my final eviction and first night on the streets, the friends who scattered like spiders in the light, the succession of shelters and encampments, the face of every cop who ever stood staring down at me…

But I smile. Even considering all that, there’s a curious tranquility to sleeping rough––no waking up with a knife to my throat, no fighting the urge to drive my fist through her face. It’s funny, if she were here right now, she’d probably yell about the condition of the tent before grabbing my bottle of Scotch and flinging it at me. Even though a hard, empty life looms ahead of me, it’s still hilariously preferable to the chaos of living with her.

I begin to laugh with relief, softly at first, but it grows louder and spills out of the tent in spasmodic bursts, reverberating around the overpass in a hollow, ghostly echo that draws the attention of haggard neighbors, rising manic and exultant above the heavy rain falling from jagged black clouds, crescendoing into a shrill and strangled sound drowned out by the cracks of thunder shaking the lowering sky.

– Colin Dunne

Author’s Note: “Under the Overpass” is a reminder that the homeless people we pass every day in the street once had lives as full, complex, dramatic, and emotional as everyone else’s. Discarded by the world, and stripped of their dignity, we must remember that they’re still the same vibrant human being as they were before they stumbled into the underbelly of society. They were once your neighbor, your co-worker, your cousin . . . granted no mercy by the economic and social systems of our times.