"They have no idea, do they? They live in their ivory towers, surrounded by comforts they never earned and thinking themselves kind and honest and earnest in their compassion, but... well, you know how it is. We all do what we must in this world, don't we?" Guadalupe nodded, a little bit surprised by the intensity of her assent. Somehow, this white woman, this complete stranger who looked as out of place sitting at a bus station as Guadalupe felt taking business classes with her hands still stinking of bleach, had put her thumb exactly on the frustrations that the Latina woman experienced every day. Her heart ached to hear it put into words.
But the stranger's gaze, so warm and sweet and compassionate, soothed the ache her words created. Her pupils were wide in the dim light of the flickering sodium arc lamp, leaving only the thinnest rim of russet brown around the dark voids. She stared tenderly into Guadalupe's eyes, and a tiny, sympathetic smile quirked the corners of her lips as she continued. "I can see you understand. You're a young woman, yes, but already so wise to the ways of the world, and you do what you must to survive. No matter what the struggle requires, you do it because it is a... a...." The woman paused for a moment, mumbling under her breath as she tried to translate the word into English from whatever Eastern European language she spoke.
"A necessity!" she crowed triumphantly, and Guadalupe nodded again in sympathy. She spoke two languages as well, better than most of her classmates spoke one, but she felt their smug, condescending stares on her skin every time she stumbled or hesitated for even a moment. It was the only time she felt visible to them, in the hot stinging spotlight of their scorn, and she would give anything to be able to turn their contempt back on them with a torrent of Spanish that they would stare at in vacant incomprehension. But of course that too would be her failing. She had to win by their rules or not at all.
And this woman, despite her icy pale skin and her frost-white hair... she knew what it was like. She spoke with an accent, she struggled with the language, she waited too long for the last bus of the night because the alternative was an hour's walk through the worst parts of town. Oh, she might be wearing the slinky, revealing dress of a prostitute instead of the cheap, drab coveralls of a cleaner, but they both understood the same struggle. Guadalupe could see it in her eyes, the russet brown turned red by the yellowed illumination of the street lamps. She could hear it in her soft, sympathetic tones. They were kindred spirits.
Despite her usual inclination for solitude, Guadalupe was glad the stranger had struck up this conversation. This woman was no conspiracy theorist, no late-night creeper who wanted to take advantage of Guadalupe's inability to leave the tiny shelter. She was fascinating. Riveting. Guadalupe hung on her every word. "The men we work for, the ones who think themselves so strong and tough and fierce as they add up numbers and shout their tantrums at other, weaker men... they have no idea what it's like to truly do what must be done to survive. Put them in your world, and they would die within days." Guadalupe gave a tiny huff of amusement at the thought of her classmates adding three jobs to their 'impossible' workloads.
"But you and I, we know all too well how to do what must be done. We strip the world down to those necessities, because the foolish considerations that those soft, comfortable idiots elevate to the heights of paramountcy are simply... irrelevant to us. They fill the air with puffed-up farts of self-importance about 'the plight of the working poor', but do they ever achieve anything? Or do they simply go back home to their creature comforts while we squat in squalor?" Guadalupe's eyes stung with frustrated tears as she recalled being harangued for her supposed apathy by campus agitators who lived on their parents' dime... but she didn't blink them away, and the stranger's gaze soon smoothed the pain into oblivion.
