There was a good reason for wearing my clothes loose and shoes comfortable. I was a social worker by day which meant I was usually walking and conversing a lot with a messy bunch of denials, lies and games of “he said, she said”. The day was full of deadlines, report writing and pressure to fruitlessly convince the ill to get well, the well to change. I had slept okay for someone who debated the misgivings of a life chosen and spent to date. The conflict was normal for me though, louder than normal.

My first assignment of the day was to visit a drug-addicted teenager living at The Pale Horse Hotel in downtown Manhattan. It was colorful in its reputation, but not in its sad exterior. As I walked into a long hall of sleeping urchins wallowing in the murkiness of a sickly sun that split the mangled mini blinds, I knew that some existences have to be bad; they can not all be good ones. She answered the door in a shirt that wrapped around her torso and neck like a bridle weaves a horse’s face and nose. Tattoos covered her much available skin; she gladly let me in.
 
Everyone in her family was dead with no pathetic loved ones available to help this sixteen year old. Like so many, she was given over to Family Services to begin her time on the pale horse where basically, we had nothing to offer her. Our manifesto to help the powerless people living on the edge was to tranquilize them of their individuality and into becoming another thorn in the side of Manhattan’s welfare system.

“Have you been following the guide to independence we set, you know, the goals we talked about last time I was here,” I always used my formal voice to begin a conversation with a client. “Didn’t we draw an outline last time I was here? I think we did, but we didn’t finish. The goal ideas were sort of sketchy as I recall.”
She had refused to participate is what I really recalled.
“Shall we begin again?”
“I don’t care,” she remarked with a thick, syrupy sarcasm in her voice, “sketch away.”

My job is to show her not the-what, but the-way. Her job is to remind me that the last time she saw her Dad they were out for a drunken walk at the beach as a storm brewed, the monstrous waves eventually washing him away after he made no effort to save her. She was four years old. Sketch away, I thought, as her fury seeped into my imagination, my acute sense of the tragic protected by the gauze wrapped around me to obliteration. Sketch away.

Later, when I emerged from the shadows of The Pale Horse Hotel, we turned and walked away from each other our backs fading from one another, which is how I like to bid good bye to clients. I do it so I can turn, without a client knowing, to watch them walk away and somehow gain insight into their existence. She seemed sad in her heavy steps, willowy hair and frail hands which swept across her thigh like a pendulum as she walked. This elegant invader shrinking from sight into a smaller figure, a hidden pen knife in hand, delicately cutting her skin as it rotated. Ultimately, cutting her life away, by the time she was twenty-one.

We searched for her pathetic loved ones only to expose the desperate and the destitute. Persons interested in her care, but not in coming to the interview with washed hands. Still, the carpet of my wandering mind was thread barren from my ceaseless pacing. My poetic imagination deadened by Manhattan’s finest citizens carving their glory days into my mind as my gauze unravels each time I watch one walk away, so adrift.