I will be honest with you about my reaction to a kid at a traffic light.
Small hand at my window. Child, eight years old at most, holding up a toy.
And before I had even looked at his face properly my hand was already moving toward the button to keep the window up. Because I have somewhere to be. Because I have seen this before. Because somewhere between the first time and now I stopped seeing a child and started seeing an inconvenience I had already learned how to manage.
Not again.
That was my first thought.
I have done this more times than I want to count. Looked past them. Waited for the light. Told myself it is probably a scam, probably organised by someone, probably not as bad as it looks, probably probably probably until the light changes and I am already gone.
I have sat in an air conditioned car and watched a child work a traffic light in the midday heat and felt nothing except mild irritation that he was there.
I treated him like a business I had chosen not to invest in.
He is eight years old.
He does not know he is a child. Not in the way children are supposed to know it. In the complete, unbothered, gloriously useless way of someone who has never once had to think about survival.
He knows which cars are more likely to buy. He knows how to read a face through glass in two seconds. He knows the price of everything he is holding and the cost of coming home without selling it.
He learned all of that before he learned anything else.
I bought the toy. Gave him a little extra. Not because it solved anything. Just because I had it and he needed it and the distance between those two facts felt indecent in that moment. He pocketed it without expression. I was a sale.
He had three more cars to get to before the light changed.
I drove home. Ate dinner. Chose what to watch. Decided when to sleep. The whole evening spread out in front of me like something I had earned.
He woke up this morning and went back to the traffic light.
We both worked yesterday. But only one of us gets to call it living. Only one of us has a childhood running quietly in the background, intact, unhurried, waiting to be lived.
The other one is eight years old and already knows that rest is something you earn.
That gap did not happen by accident.
It happened because enough people decided that a small hand at a window is a nuisance to be managed rather than an emergency to be answered. That the light will change and someone else will deal with it eventually.
He does not know it is not supposed to be like this. He is not waiting to be rescued. He is just working. In the only world he has ever been given.
That world was built by our indifference.
And it will only change because of what you do with this feeling right now, before it fades, before dinner, before the evening becomes yours again and he becomes a thought you had once.
For the boy at the traffic light who deserved to be seen,
Hafsa