When I passed you on my way home I didn’t think about you nor feel a hairsbreadth of sympathy. I was talking about someone at work, how she’d pissed me off in an e-mail. “She’s so curt,” I think I said. It wasn’t until hours later while looking at the sky, a sky whose size unsteadied me, that I started thinking of you, you and others like you, all the human beings on this planet suffering simultaneously, the hundreds, thousands, millions. . . . How incomprehensible, I thought, standing there on my covered porch while you stood on one leg on a traffic median, hungry and homeless in a ruined side of Baltimore in the pouring rain.