This morning, like most mornings, my travel path intersected hundreds of other commuters, a hand full of them working the subways for spare change, spare food, and even at times it seemed, just a bit of acknowledgment from another human being that they too were still alive.

And this morning, like most,  just after the one train pulled out of the Times Square station, a small, worn-looking brown-skinned woman set about a typical soliloquy of solicitation from myself and the other passengers. After a few minutes, over the edge of my book, under her extra-large-emerald-green- t-shirt, I made out her baby bump.

In the years that I’d tried to conceive, homeless women ripe with pregnancy, with a frightening regularity would find their way to me, our lives crossing paths. One memorable day, less than an hour after the stain of red had announced that we’d failed to conceive yet again, I spotted a middle-aged woman hugely pregnant excavating the trash can for dinning possibilities, a block away from my home. I stood in awe, bathed in tears, as a woman with less financial stability, no heath coverage, no access to a fertility specialist, manged to achieve what I could not.

Today, five years later, I saw, mostly, a sad broken soul bringing a new soul into the world. Today my heart cracked for her, and her alone.