He lived on handouts and whatever he could find—tobacco from spent cigarette tabs, old food from restaurant bins—and always with the passive indifference of strangers. Just wandering around the city and sometimes when he felt like it, scrounging a ride to some other place in another street or another park somewhere. He had let his hair and beard grow for years, to hide his face—he could have been forty or fifty or sixty years old, but the ancient clothing and the invisibility of his type made him timeless.

Life was spending days lying on benches, in doorways; walking slowly and aimlessly around the world, seemingly without direction. People looked right through him, right past him without comment or reason to care. These days he noticed them just as infrequently as they noticed him and never did he think to hold his hand out to beg a little change off of any of them. He slowed thought to a trickle, reduced instinct to that needed to stay alive, barely breathing whilst the seasons came and went, changing around him as he limped through the diesel fumes and traffic to find that endlessly elusive warm place to sleep.

Long days and nights of quiet sorrow and the restless twitch of the vagrant defined him utterly and completely; the winter brought painful cold and the summer brought little release. He never raised his eyes to the sky or the faces of those he drifted amongst like a ghost.

His only contact with humanity was at the homeless shelter in the city, where he sometimes tried—along with all the other homeless men—to find space for a safe night's rest. Sometimes Judy—the middle aged woman who managed the shelter—would consciously try to meet his gaze, looking deep into his grey eyes and smiling some encouragement as he queued with the other hopefuls for a rare taste of charity-subsidised sleep indoors. He never spoke to her, merely nodding and indicating courtesy with an inscrutable and indefinable air of civility. He kept himself as clean as he could, washed whenever he had the chance, never drank and avoided conflict with the other men. For that reason alone he was known and generally well regarded by the charity workers he encountered when he ventured into their hands.

When he left them, he would always leave his bunk immaculately tidy and nod sincere thanks for their efforts to help him, to the staff on his way out.

Judy was accustomed to working with men like him—men who had fallen through the cracks and were living on the very periphery—but he was the only one she knew who didn't try to drown in drink or drugs, the only one not mired in helpless mental illness or violence. He came and went as often as he could get in, or raise the token fee for the shelter. The rest of the time he remained invisible in the city. He was an enigma, even among the varied membership of the lost tribe of desolate and broken down wanderers flitting in and out of the charity's doors every night.

She had previously tried to check up on his background, based on what little she knew. All that she did know was his name; he had been required to give it the first time he had turned up. It had been the one and only time anyone there remembered him saying a word to anyone. She had discretely run a background check as she sometimes did, to check for anything she might need to know - any potential danger a man might pose to the other sleepers and staff in the shelter; any outstanding warrants or court orders she might be forced to report him for. His record had been completely clean. No history of any illness, crime or detention; no brushes with the legal or psychiatric care systems that she could find. There was absolutely nothing. He simply wasn't anywhere in any of the usual records and for all intents and purposes was off the grid for social services completely.

When he had spoken his name to her, that one and only time, his voice had been calm and clear. She hadn't forgotten its sound.

Somehow she welcomed his presence, welcomed his silent and thoughtful air during the shifts she volunteered at the shelter and sometimes, when she returned to her comfortable home, with its loving family and husband, she found herself wondering about him; about who he'd been and how he'd fallen to the street life.

She wondered where he went—where any of them went—when they were alone. She wondered about his past.

But he didn’t think of Judy or her world. He just kept walking and forced his thought to a minimum; as he trudged along the old streets of the city he spent his time calmly focused on nothing, trying to lose the thing that had haunted him for so long. He lived as simply as he could, avoided attention and kept moving, walking, hitching, hiding from the memory which threatened to destroy him every second he remained alive.

Sometimes though, alone and tired beyond comprehension he couldn't avoid it and the old pain of infinite loss surged through him like an arctic river. At those times he could do nothing but curl into a ball and weep silently for her when he remembered how she had been taken away so long ago; when they had been living, blissfully contented and unafraid together within the society he now shunned so violently. Those were the lonely moments when he thought about her death, the lingering cancer that had claimed her after just three years of their marriage and how he had come back from her hospital bedside that last time to find the house they had happily shared lying cold, dead and empty. Those were the times when he became catatonic with the
horror of it all and lost in the despair that had driven him to turn and walk away from everything he had ever been and known; out onto the streets and forever into numbing invisibility.