Here’s a story, a real one:

I work in apartment complexes – meaning a bunch of apartments piled up in one place. Often they are very bad ones – where blacks, poor people, students, and all kinds of immigrants live. The stink and the scum are one thing on hand. But the saddest thing is to enter an apartment and see the signs of a hasty exit complete with leaving behind photographs and personal belongings. Often a heavy marijuana stench or scattered syringe needles are left behind too. It gets even worse when you see kid’s toys laying around and drawings on the wall by the abandoned soiled matress left laying crooked on the stained carpet.

One day I enter an apartment. I see a few personal items. Obviously some Mexicans lived here – one can tell by the kind of items. In such level apartments in every case they are illegal immigrants – the ones we both hate and can’t live without because we just love to have everything to be done cheap for us.

And so I see a pink bracelet just like the one on the picture below. I pick it up, read the name, the date. Crap. From everything that those people grabbed in the last moment running out from the apartment then forgot the most important one. I imagined how this pink bracelet floated from the delivery room to the slum apartment and how the people were happy for at least a little while. And then – day after day they made a resemblance of a live, the baby grew and cried and made cooing sounds and overall the first years of his life flew by. Then one day – we ran out in a hurry to go somewhere else.

That joy and that running away describes all of us more or less, I think. We all have times of joy, times when we keep pushing to survive, moments when we run away from ourselves, from something we’ve carried inside for a long time. And we forget the small and most important things. No matter if they are tangible or not.