lonely hearts in a big city

"I'm suicidal."

A voice drifts over our shoulders and Jodi and I turn. The voice belonged to a shoddy-looking man, unshaved, dirty, and looking very untidy with his shirt tucked out over a long black pants. "I'm miserable, I have no feelings, I hate myself and I feel there's no point continuing living." As soon as he finishes his speech, he lays his head down once again on the metal bench along Bourke St.

I first met Jodi that very same day on the streets on 17 October 2008, a jovial red-haired Aussie, slightly chubby with a cheerful grin plastered on her face. That's how we became friends. She is 26 years old this year, and has been living on and off the streets for the past fifteen years. Estranged from her family, she relies on welfare organizations to provide her daily meals and other necessities. When I asked her where is her home, her reply was, 'Salvation Army'.

I asks her how she spends her time, with no job and no education (she stopped after Grade 8, because she hated school, which she very much regrets now). She says that she whiles her time away by walking, sitting and talking to strangers on the street. I followed her along and told her to treat me as invisible. Very soon, Jodi is chatting up a couple, a Chinese girl lying on the lap of her boyfriend. She joins me very soon again, and I say to her, 'Great job, Jodi. That conversation lasted - looks at my watch - less than five seconds.'

Jodi is bumbling down the street again, looking for strangers to chat up. I follow her along the congested streets on a Friday afternoon, and someone soon sticks a newspaper into my face. 'No, thanks' I say. But, the person tries again and I reject, turning to leave. But, the person - an old, frail-looking woman - is nonplussed. 'Why don't you want it? Why wouldn't you want to read such a good newspaper?' I stop, and take a look at the newspaper - The Epoch Times. On the front of the cover is a story about a 22-year-old boy in China being beaten to death by 6 Chinese policemen for obstructing their way. Three pictures came along with it: First, of the deceased's mother kneeling on the floor and crying bitterly at her son's death; second, of the corpse, with a face that the deceased's sister said, 'was beaten so out of shape that she could hardly recognize her brother' and the third, of the congested streets where a protest was held where the boy was beaten to death. 'This is the only newspaper in the whole of Melbourne that dares to talk.' I'm listening, and the woman continues. Very soon, our conversation stretches out into an infinity, and Jodi waits patiently at the sidewalk.

The old woman tells me that during the Tiananmen crackdown in 1949, the Chinese police force used guns to shoot down students and huge trucks to run them over. She says that her own experience with the Chinese government has been 'traumatic'. Her grandparents were being shot dead by the Chinese government. Why? Only because they were richer than the government, and so they were being accused of wrongdoing simply because the government couldn't stand anyone having greater wealth than them.

She continues by saying that brain-washing by the Chinese government is so great, that even the young generation has been won over by the propaganda and lies that the government tells. 'Look at places like Melbourne - where we have protests taking place everyday. It's a free society, and people are allowed freedom of speech.' Then, she goes on to lament that today's society is led astray by money. Take the recent milk poisoning incident for example, where the government placed financial wealth over their citizens' health and well-being. My China friend tells me that after the incident was uncovered, she became terrified, because many of the milk products which she had taken growing up turned out to have 'poisonous' ingredients in them.

We continue our walk down Swanston St and Jodi is high-fiving people on the streets, which she calls 'my friends'. The smartly-attired man playing the violin, the homeless Big Issue vendors, the tattooed-guys with their skateboards and the old man dancing on the streets - she knows them all.

She chats up one of the tattooed-guys sitting on a bench.

'Where's your girlfriend?' Jodi asks.

'She's off stealing stuff for me,' the guy replies, pointing to David Jones and the conversation ends there. Jodi doesn't have a say in what happens next, because I am pulling her by her grey sweater down the streets towards David Jones. 'Where are we going?' She asks. 'To stop his girlfriend from stealing stuff.' 5 seconds later, and we are scanning the men's section of David Jones looking for that dude's girlfriend. The search turned out unsuccessful, and we soon gave up, continuing our stroll down Melbourne CBD.

'Don't you ever get tired walking?' I ask Jodi, and she laughs, 'You get used to it!'

I tell her that my legs are very tired and we sit down along Bourke St. You can always rely on Jodi for a good life story. For example, I asked her how she knew so much about pickpockets, (like how they go to Big W, take off their shoes, put on a new pair on the shelf and walk out of the store) and her answer was that they were her friends. Her eyes have seen much more things than the average 26-year-old. I once jokingly said to her, 'You think too much!' only to be silenced by her reply, 'Think too much, or know too much?' So, there I was having a chat with Jodi, and she was telling me about the rough patches that she went through in life. And, how there was a point in time, where she felt like committing suicide.

Right at this point, a man's head pops over from behind our shoulders and in a deep voice, he growled, 'I'm suicidal.'

I soon learn his name is Nathan. He once tried to kill himself by jumping off a building. I ask him what made him changed his mind. He said that at the last minute, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He talked about his past, his colorful history which only served to highlight his current bleak condition. He used to be a strong Christian, but after a traumatic mental illness which struck him at the age of 20, he stopped believing there was a God. He said he hated himself, and he could see no meaning in life, and that God had abandoned him. 'If there really was a God, he would have saved me,' he rationalized.

Jodi tells him that God loves him, and if he truly seek, he will find. I tell him that God has a purpose for everyone in life, and God's purpose for him is definitely not to spend his youth wasting away on a bench along Bourke St, smoking and drinking his life away. We spend an hour just chatting with Nathan, and just before we leave, he turned to me and said, 'I used to be a man with charisma, you know? Do you know what is the meaning of charisma?' I nod, and he says, 'So, I'm not mad, I'm not a crazy man.'

Jodi and I continue our journey along the streets. Just outside Starbuck's, colorful bunches of flowers circled a pillar. Jodi picks one up. I look at it. It said, 'We all love you very much. Rest in peace, Catz.' Catz is the cyclist who recently was knocked over by a bus parked along Swanston St and was killed instantly. This sparked off a huge furore, with hundreds of cyclists congregating along Swanston St in protest against buses parked along that area which posed a huge danger to them. There was even the no-vehicles zone proposal - to turn Swanston St into Swanston Walk.

My tutor was so damn right where she said the city is a myraid of stories - you just gotta know where to look.