I have seen many strange things in Florida, but the homeless people are perhaps the strangest.  They are the ones who would have frozen on the streets of Detroit, huddled under some bridge with the sooty remnants of a failed fire dusting a threadbare coat with ash; but here in Florida, where the coldest nights demand little more than a good sleeping bag and a little patience, there exists a curious strain of homeless that strains the definition of human.

The first time I saw it, I was on a bus from Waters Avenue to downtown.  A waxen approximation of a black man eased on, each limb moving individually, for that seemed all he could manage.  He could not even swipe his pass to gain admission; the bus driver had to take it from him and run the card through herself.  She gave the card back and I was surprised that the man gripped it.  He could have been any age above fifty, but I would have pegged him in his late seventies.  He had no cane, instead moving one hand along with each foot to brace himself until he half-settled and half-fell into a seat.

It was his mouth that gave it away.  It opened and closed repeatedly, as if something years ago had shocked him so badly that he had never found words again.  He stared blankly ahead without recognition, never moving a muscle except for that flapping jaw and an occasional spasm in his right hand causing his fingers to flutter.  I wondered:  where is he going?  Is there, within that body, the strength of purpose to retain destination?  Or does he wander aimlessly like a wounded animal, gravitating instinctively toward warmth?

I color him pathetic, a meandering body that has not quite found a good reason to die officially, but perhaps I misjudge.  Perhaps the spark still burned within that frame, and his was a desperate struggle to keep mind and body cloven together; perhaps that rigid body was locked in the same struggle as mine, his admission of pain far less than my endless angst.  Who knows what joys and horrors have passed before those glassy eyes as he fought for each moment to come, fought so that time would not slow until in a frozen frame he would pause, icy fear setting in, and then awaken just long enough for vertigo to unhinge his knobby joints and send him crashing to the sidewalk, gone forever.