He was an urban legend. One of those legends that settle deep into the community, amidst all the technology and electronics, to become real but not real. He was an old man. Scruffy beard, long dirty tweed coat, boots that never laced up and hair that hung in a braid down the middle of his back. There was no colour to him, unless you were able to get close to him and see his blue, blue eyes. Eyes that twinkled beneath his shaggy eyebrows, buried deep in his weathered face. But no one had ever really seen him. The stories about him could never be confirmed. He was like a shadow. Sometimes he was very, very old. Sometimes he was only 60 something. There was never anyone with him. He didn’t seem to have a place, and yet his place was wherever he was - sleeping on a sidewalk, eating a meal in a diner or striding down the middle of a road. What made this man a legend is that his stories were told me when I was ten, when I was in my twenties and then I had my own stories in the decades that followed. After hearing all of the stories of his wives, his children, that he was really a millionare, that he was a spy or that he was really an alien ~ I began to see him myself and tell my stories to my children and my grandchildren. He was not a mean man or a good man, just a man who was only a shadow of what he could be. This man, this shadow, never changed. Only the times and the stories that were told.
Stigma is like that. Painting long shadows over the men and women that are marginalized and lost. Never allowing anyone to see the twinkling blue or brown eyes. To see the legends that they have lived. To learn whether they are mean or good or just ordinary. Stigma does not allow a place but places the shadows in alleys and dark corners.
“What men call the shadow of the body is not
the shadow of the body, but the body of the soul.”
~ Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates
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