we're tangled in causes

"Hey," she asks, "do you have a moment?"

I turn around, giving nothing away but a slight indication of recognition – I know her cause before it slips from her lips. The signs are all the same and she catches me before I produce an excuse with a wave of her folder, and I'm bound by the part of me that doesn't want to feel bad for turning her down.

She carries on, words falling from her mouth like a clutter of recited text and I nod, eyes spilling where her hands guide me and I find myself lost in a plastic collection of papers, statistics, and reprinted images. She speaks about rights that the nameless children do not have, abuse hanging on the edge of her hurried tone like some sort of dead metaphor, falling into cerebral connection like a ten-piece puzzle sorting itself into place.    

Suffering, they always say, pictures speaking thousands of words but losing meaning in numbers. I see what she wants me to see, though; the deprivation, the raw charm captured in a bright smile, the audacity captured through hopeful idealism in the sharp brown eyes of a nameless child. Or perhaps I tell myself that that is what she wants me to see, because underneath the layers of paper, underneath that unfamiliar flesh, I see everything that child might've appreciated in my stead.

In that image, I see my own fingers running through my hair, catching tangles where I last left them uncombed and wonder if it's worth the effort to undo something so meaningless – intricate by complexity, but so easily replaced. It's just a little tug followed by a sting, after all; nothing harsh like the blades I did not hold against my wrists, or the pills I did not gather once a month from my mother's new refills.    

I tell myself, as I gaze into those eyes younger than mine, that suffering probably isn't the right word for me – not for that last heartbreak, not for that last mistake of words driven and arguments bred, not even for that string of colorful words that escaped from my father's lips. I can boast no bruises and scars, or pharmaceutical misuse, or even a life on the streets without someone to hold – my thoughts and textbooks are my inferior equivalent to the knives they craft to survive another day on streets they only know as home.   

I feel insignificant because I do not bleed like they do. I only know the scattering of my emotions and what it is like to fall apart in my quiet corners, where nobody lends a shoulder, a smile.

I suddenly envy the children in the plastic folder; for there is nobody campaigning for me.

"So?" Her gaze gives nothing away, and I imagine that she's learned to expect something or nothing, for they are the only two answers she'll ever receive for her cause.

"I'm late for class," I say, breathing my tangent of a lie as I keep moving, my cause inevitably my own.