Hello, Mr. Spider

Monica is crouched next to me, intently cleaning a spot on the ground with a napkin. As she wipes, she chatters away, a constant stream of words that I ignore. I am busy doing paperwork, which I have told her three times.

I smile and say again in a sing-song voice, “Monica, I’m not listening to you.”

Without looking up, she says, “That’s okay. I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the spider. Hello spider.” I laugh, which I know has been her goal all along. Now she looks up at me — her quick black eyes framed by short black hair — and smiles.

She gets back to her spot, wiping furiously at it, and continues talking to her new pet. “Don’t worry, Mr. Spider. I won’t kill you. I like spiders. You eat bugs. I don’t like bugs.” I laugh again and get back to my paperwork.

A week from now, when I next see Monica, she’ll be using baby wipes to furiously wipe blood out of her jeans, tears running down her face. She will shakily tell me about the man who just raped her minutes earlier. She won’t say much. And she will leave a few moments later.

The following week, she’ll be curled up on the ground screaming in pain as I hold her in my arms. While in jail, she’d been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and given four months to live. That was two months ago. The pain has been getting steadily worse as her lymph nodes are eaten up by the cancer. If she’d been regularly seeing a primary care doctor, it might have been caught it in time. But life on the streets doesn’t leave room for preventative medicine.

But it does allow access to pain medication. Monica will keep increasing the amount of heroin she injects to deal with the pain. Which means she also will increase the amount of meth she takes to counteract the depressant effects of the heroin. Which means she will do more and more dates to make money to pay for the increased amount of drugs.

Three months from now — at age 39 — the cancer will kill her. She is the only street woman I know of who died a “natural death.” All the others die from overdose, homicide or suicide.

But all of that is in the future.

At this moment, she’s happily talking to her pet spider and trying to make me laugh while cleaning a spot she likely wiped away long ago.

And that’s how I choose to remember her.

— By Christine Barber, executive director, Street Safe New Mexico