"The greatest poverty isn't sleeping on the streets; it's being seen by the world and still feeling invisible."

Clarendon Street in South Melbourne is a strip that never sleeps. Lined with cafes, boutiques, and trams rumbling past like clockwork, it's a place where the hum of city life feels both comforting and hurried. The old architecture is elegant, a charm in the bustle, and beneath all that, if you look closely, a heartbreaking truth often ignored.

During the time I lived there, I began to notice faces that most people avoided. Faces etched with hardship, lined by years of cold pavements and colder stares. I started calling them my “homeless buddies.” Not out of pity, but out of familiarity, a kind born from shared moments over something as simple as a $1 7-Eleven coffee.

Every morning, without fail, I’d stop and chat, just 5 or 10 minutes. We talked about their night, how they slept, if they managed to stay dry, and what they had planned for the day, even if it was just finding a spot out of the wind. Over time, they stopped being strangers. They became people with names, stories, pain, and humour. And then one week, when I’d been away, I returned to find them genuinely worried, asking if I was okay. That concern, that raw human emotion… it pierced through me like nothing else. Because it was pure. Unfiltered. Real.

Some were elderly men. Weathered not just by time, but by trauma, by families that had cast them out, by the weight of mental illness, by a society that decided they were too broken to fix. You could see it in their eyes: a haunted, hollow kind of sadness.

What broke me, over and over again, was how people treated them. As if they were invisible. Coins were thrown at their feet like scraps. Eyes averted. No words. No warmth. That’s why I gave them my time, the one thing I could never get back. It was the only currency that truly mattered to them. Not because it was money, but because it said: I see you.

Every evening, I’d return to my warm apartment. I’d curl up in bed beside my cat, the heater humming softly, and the contrast of it all would sit heavy on my chest. Because just outside, on that same street, they lay on the frozen ground, wrapped in layers of clothing that smelled like rain and survival. And the world kept turning.

So this winter, when the night drops to 2°C and frost clings to your windows like breath on glass, I ask you: remember them. Remember that while you drift off beneath a thick duvet, someone else is trying to survive until morning with nothing but a park bench and a threadbare blanket.

They don’t need your pity. They need your humanity. A moment. A word. A coffee. A gesture that says you matter.

Because the truth is, it’s not the cold that hurts the most. It’s being forgotten.