This story takes place in New York City, a city of sparkling lights and dazzling sites. A city of starving and poor and greedy men who want more. The condemned of this story was a hollow man with a hollow face whose life was to try and fill his hollow belly. Those dealing the condemnation? A hardened aunt and a confused boy. It’s important to say that this man didn’t come into the world hollow, but was made hollowed by actions like mine.

It had been a week since we had first arrived; the cold air of New York had settled in and all the hurried people were dressed in their plush and warm clothes. A muggy sky shrouded the city, and no sun shined on days like this. It was Christmas time and I was on vacation with my aunt and uncle. I had been living with them for little over a year, ever since my dad passed away and my family was divided up. I remember walking those streets ashamed of the things we could buy. I had been raised in the life where I was the one who couldn’t, and now I lived with people that could. I was 13 at the time, and this is the age I glimpsed how I could help to kill a man.

I was walking these cold streets when my time of sin came. It came in the form of a homeless man. A man who had watch the modest and the rich stride past him all his life. A man who, by some amount of misfortune, had ended up spanging to sustain himself. I had seen men homeless before; my father had always given when they asked for life in the form of bread or money. This man, however, was different. The look of this man I will never forget. Have you ever looked into the eyes of someone truly in despair? Of someone who has nothing else to live for, and yet is still slightly interested in surviving, if only someone would spare him the courtesy of it? He wore nothing that I could see but a ragged and torn dirt colored blanket. The man’s hair was long, like that of the pictures of Jesus. It was matted and covered in dirt. This ghost yet living man walked up to our group, and asked me for that which he asks all, life. Why he looked with those haunting eyes at a 13 year old to help him, I can never guess. I reached in my pocket to give this hungry man twenty dollars that had been gifted to me. My aunt however, being of a different character than my father, told me not to give this starving man that money. She gave the excuse that more than likely, he would use it for drugs or that he already had enough. Her heart had been taught to be callous to such people. She had been taught to be like the men and women with the fur coats; she had been taught by life to deny the suffering. I will never forget the look in that man who was alone, and hungry, and dying when I told that I couldn’t give him my money. My aunt pulled me away and I listened to her, stowing the twenty in my pants. They commanded me to walk away from that wanting man, and so I did. So I walked past him like so many others did that day, and the moment passed. I kept from him life just like all the others, and I saw my denial take the last bit from that man. He was shunned by an innocent soul, and so though himself nothing. He turned hollow that day. I’m sure that man died.

 That moment defined me. That moment taught me to never again let the voice of another stop me from doing what was right. That moment put in me my resolve to always help. To never, in all of my days, take a second to rest while men died. I vowed that day to never withhold myself or any kindness I could give to this world while others suffered. I vowed that would be the last starving man I watched starve. This was the moment that changed my life. I swore to never be the antagonist of the suffering again.