The woman

Every morning, I come out of the República Argentina metro stop and walk five minutes to my office building. I pass by a hospital, Sanatorio San Francisco de Asis, and outside this hospital's brick compound, near the gated entrance, sits a woman. Every single day, all day long, she sits there. She used to look bigger before, but now I see that she is pretty tiny. Maybe there was an other woman before her, or maybe she wears fewer layers of clothing now that it's warmer, but it doesn't matter. The thing is, the sight of this woman stirs up a hot, hot sense of shame in my chest every single morning.

She has a leathery brown face, wears complex layers of clothing, a band of blue fabric wrapped around her head, and does not look very Spanish. She holds a coffee cup (filled with coffee or change, I don't know), and a laminated sign, with some lines of writing in Spanish. I've tried to read the sign for over a month now, but it's not very easy when I breeze past her, ashamed to look at her for too long. I do know that it says something about children, probably hers, and has a picture of children on it.

This morning at the metro station near my flat, two people were handing out breakfast cookies as part of a product promotion, and they gave me two packets. I ate one on the train, and was daydreaming about giving the other packet to the woman. When I got to the Sanatorio, I very nearly brushed past her as usual but some part of me forced me to stop, dig out the biscuits from my backpack and hand them to her. She accepted them graciously and said something to me, but I couldn't hear because I had my earphones in and the music was loud or maybe it was my pulse, but I nodded in response and went to do social work on a computer.

The part of me that made me stop? I just hope it grows and gets bigger than the part of me that ignores her twice a day.