"Today I Smiled at a Man....."
Lately the world has felt loud, fast, and a little unhinged.
Sirens, headlines, everyone braced for the next awful thing. I’ve caught myself walking around with my shoulders up by my ears, scanning for what might go wrong instead of noticing what’s right in front of me.
But today, on my way to work, a small, ordinary moment knocked me out of that autopilot.
An older man stepped into a busy road, moving at a pace the rest of the world didn’t have patience for. What happened next stayed with me all day, and this poem came out of that.
It’s about bias, about being a woman in public, about fear and intuition, and about how sometimes the smallest, most forgettable choices are the ones that actually change us.
“Today I Smiled at a Man”
by Kelly Colón
Today I smiled at a man on the street on my way to work.
He was older, shuffling across an overworked road in the town that I live in.
If bias had been driving, you could’ve called him homeless. I don’t know if that was true. I don’t need to.
He didn’t use the crosswalk, the one painted to make drivers feel lawful and pedestrians feel safe. He stepped out where he was, moving at a pace that did not belong to morning traffic.
He walked slowly. The kind of slow that irritates people who worship urgency. The kind of slow we are taught to see as an inconvenience instead of a body doing its best.
I didn’t just slow down. I stopped. Full and complete
In another version of me, a younger version, a girl trained on caution and crime shows, I might have tensed. We are taught early as women to fear unknown men in public, to cross the street, to look down, to make ourselves smaller so our bodies don’t become a problem to solve.
But my first instinct today was not fear. It was intuition. Something in me said, Stay. Make space. Bear witness.
The car on the other side of the road laid on the horn, hands flying in the silent theater of their own outrage. Yelling in a sealed car at a man who could not hear them, or maybe had stopped listening to that tone years ago.
He kept walking. Small steps. Worn shoes. Chin level.
Then he reached my lane. Our eyes met.
I smiled. Not the tight, polite one. A real one. The kind that says, I see you. Take your time. You are not in my way.
His whole face changed. His eyes brightened, creased at the edges, and he smiled back like I had just handed him something he hadn’t been offered in a while.
I stayed stopped longer than I had to long enough that the cars behind me had to stop too. Long enough for him to clear my bumper, the sidewalk, and the invisible line where “my problem” ends and “not my problem” begins.
I don’t know if he’ll remember me. The woman with the fauxhawk who paused the morning for a minute.
But I remember him.
In a world addicted to speed, certainty, and suspicion, a shared glance and a warm smile rewired my whole day.
Today I smiled at a man. Today a man smiled back. And for a brief second, the road between us didn’t feel so hostile.
It felt human.
As women, we’re taught to shrink, to cross the street, to lower our gaze “just in case.” That wiring lives in my body too. Which is why this tiny, ordinary moment felt like such a big deal: for once, my first instinct wasn’t fear, it was connection. He may never remember me, but I’ll remember that choice.
It’s a reminder that I get to decide who I become in these in-between seconds.