Sister's Savior

She's artistic; she's hurting and she's surviving. Blond, fifty-something and tearful, she's the friend of the woman that got run over by the bus a couple or three months ago. She says, " You know her; she's been here before, maybe for clothes." She says her (the deceased) name and I try to put a face with the name. Not possible, there have been so many like her who have come in and out of my life. Yet, I feel her. She's at Emancipation Station right now-- maybe twelve or fifteen of her--trying to right herself from the wrongs done to her--sometimes with her consent.





She says, "Sex doesn't mean anything to me except money, or a place to say or...." She says, my dream therapist told me to wake up and get up and write my night terrors and I remembered." What she remembered gave me a sadness, knowing that the prostitution, the drugs, the tears were not hers alone but the tears of so many others that have come in and out of my life. She says, "I was lying in the bed and hands were touching me--my uncles hands--and I let him do to me to keep him from doing it to my sister who was lying on the other side. And she let him do it to her to save me. I was her savior and she was mine.