The Doorway I Stopped Checking

For months there's been a man in the doorway of the shuttered dry cleaner on my walk home from the closing shift, always the same corner, a green sleeping bag zipped to the chin. I don't know his name. I've never once said hello. What I have done, every night, without deciding to, is start angling toward the far curb about a block out, so that by the time I pass him I'm already on the other side of the street, already looking at my phone, already somewhere else.

It's not that I'm scared of him. He's never said a word to me. It's that speaking would mean deciding something, giving him money or not giving him money, looking at him or looking away on purpose instead of by accident, and I don't want to decide anything at 2am, I just want to get to my door. So I cross. Every night. I've timed it so well I don't think about it anymore, my feet just do it a block out, like a habit I never agreed to.

Tonight the doorway was empty. No bag, no him, just a rectangle of clean pavement where the rest of the sidewalk's dirty. And the first thing I felt, before anything else could get in front of it, was relief. My whole body, unclenching, three blocks early.

I stood there a second too long for someone who claims not to have decided anything about him. Then I kept walking, on my own side of the street this time, and did not let myself finish the thought about what relief like that is supposed to mean about a person.