A fairy tale from the coffee shop.

It had so happened whilest my sister and I were partaking of a steaming cup of java and talking about certain nihilistic aspects of our existence that a man with a tangled beard wandered our direction when we had just finished saying how strange life is. We had not asked him to join us but little were we inclined to turn this poor fellow away.

"You wanna talk about strange?" were his first words as he took his place between my sister and I at the coffeehouse table. And so he began his horrific tale, a story which simply spellbound we country siblings and robbed us of all utterence between each other. Apparently, this man had been a fairly wealthy and very kind contractor from the midland who did jobs all over. We best took his words that he was kind due to his aversion to strong and distasteful language. He had met a man who's name I dare not repeat for fear of being at the mercy of this devil among men. He had asked our guest to do a job for him upon his property down south and across the country line which in turn our guest had accepted. But upon finishing his job, he had been run down by his employer's workers twice at sixty miles an hour, crushed under the vehicle and sustaining many mortal injuries. From that point on, it seemed he had not gotten his confidence back to return to his work. There was no doubt in my mind that he was quite qualified still, his explanations of his work something which sounded quite masterful.

So it is in this sense that I wonder what truly makes people live on the streets? A man who had once been successful and still had much of the expertise of his profession still wandered the streets of the city. Was it because he forgot how to do his work? Was it because he was unhirable? I'm compelled to say that this can't be the case. His confidence was shot, his will to succeed in shambles from what cruelty he had been forced to endure. This made me wonder, if a man with such promising professional aspects can end up like that, how will a person without them find a way to live without confidence in himself?

I don't believe he can...