Monthly Archives: June 2009

Alan Forrest Smith

I’ve just seen a man with a dead face talking.

As I walked out of my local town from the distance as I walked slowly down the hill I could see a guy sitting on a step.

He was wearing a dirty gray hoodie, filthy blue jeans with holes in, his blond hair was long, dirty and matted.

In his right hand was a cigarette. He was talking. He looked dead in the face.

His skin was gray, almost like a battleship paint color with parts of his face actually peeling away.

His eyes were almost black to look at surrounding with a huge circle of pain and hard times.

I found it hard to look at him. Actually he was smiling, he was talking to a girl that look almost as bad as he did.

They were both sat on the step of a drug recovery house. They looked a long way from recovery of any kind.

But you know I wondered.

I wondered how many times, how many opportunities, how many moments had slipped this guy by. He had seen them and let them go. Why? I have no idea but looking at him right now (without judgment) he was clearly in a place that was literally making him look like the walking dead.

I thought about his mother, his father, his siblings and how they would feel if they saw him in this moment? I think the answer is obvious.

But here is my point.

Five years ago, ten years ago he could have been a young guy with a lot of hope for the future. Dreams of achievement, flying first class, driving his dream machine, living his life at its fullest potential, in a beautiful relationship with the lady of his life.

OMG… continue reading

By Alan Forrest Smith

There’s a man at the window.

Well he’s not on the outside, he’s on the inside but spends his day looking out.

One day as I was passing I stopped and asked the man …

"I see you almost everyday looking out the window"

He replied, "yes I am looking out of the window"

I stopped just for a moment and then dared to further the conversation.

I asked, "looking at what exactly from your window"

He replied "change"

I asked, "change with what?" because as you can imagine I was intrigued.

He replied, "change in my circumstance’s"

I was even more curious at this point because I wasn’t quite sure what to say next after all it was none of my business.

So I gently asked the man at the window, "when you say circumstance, what do you mean?"

He simply replied, "my life, I hate it the way it is, it’s always been the same, I just want change"

So I said goodbye, thanked him for speaking to me and offered to bring back anything from the shops that he might need.

I went to the shops and walked back past the man’s home. There he was stood at the window. I waved, he waved back.

He is the man at the window.

What I haven’t mentioned just yet is I have seen that man almost everyday over the past 20 years standing, staring, looking out of his window. He was waiting, he is waiting, he’ll always be waiting until the day he dies.

Anyway, it really got me thinking about people and their lives. It got me thinking about my own life and how it has transformed to an unrecognizable place from just a few years ago.

In 2003 there I was slaving… continue reading