They talked about lepers in Church today.

And then I met Shawn.

He likes trains.

And there's this car that, by golly, you ought to see the look in his eyes when he talks about that car he's saving up for.

And one day, one day soon— before my time at UCLA is up— he's gonna roll up to campus in that beautiful car.

Look for me, he says as he walks away, I'm gonna drive up here and take you for a ride.

We'll go cruisin, I say.

We'll go cruisin, he agrees.

Shawn has milky brown eyes.

He looks like he hasn't slept in days.

Which it seems he hasn't, as he mentions, walking me back to campus.

Shawn has more than a bit of stubble,

black being invaded by white.

He tells me he's 35.

Shawn has dark brown skin,

the color of rich chocolate and

sloshed dirt.

The cops in New York are dirty as heck, he says.

He'll never move back.

Shawn's got a good head on him too, going on about everything from

driving a train to

the ancestry of the Germans to

how to melt down gold with special acids.

He works hard.

He likes to clean.

He's got his eye on his dream like you wouldn't believe.

Just another ex-convict you meet on the bus,

I suppose.

But to me, he's special.

Because all that time I thought he was the leper.

And then he reached out and touched me, and said, 'Be Clean!'

And now I know what it's like to live without peace.

Safety is not a right, but a gift, it seems.

Only for the elect.

I never knew it.

Working hard is not enough, it seems.

Sometimes you have to stay where you are.

I never knew it.

There is injustice in this world, it seems.

Apparently the legends are true.

I never knew it.

I knew it all, but I never knew it.

How did I never know...

Until one day a man reached out to me and opened my eyes.

I was the leper all along.

I have been touched today by a world I've never been able to know.

And I don't like it.

Maybe Jesus's greatest pain wasn't the cross after all, but the compassion he carried upon his soul's shoulders for everyone else.

The heaviest burden to carry is someone else's agony.

What is it— really— to be alive?