Being homeless was never easy for me but if you have it easy your barely starting. This is my story, growing up my family and I never had much we lived in a small shack you could say, our living room was our bed room and kitchen the only thing apart from it was the bathroom, we never had clean water but with everything else we made it work. Although to many it wasn’t much, to me it was my everything, it was home. Now that Im 18, I live 100 miles away from where I first started, my parents are gone, my home demolished among others to become apartments for the higher level, its just me, my sleeping bag and tent. Going through the world as it swings its pendulum through time, right now I’m at this Walmart that seems like its been open for more then 100 of years, yet it’s been abandoned for almost a year. Moss grows on the side of the building, weeds taller then me line the walls of the building on all sides, as if mother nature wants to reclaim the land that was once hers. Maybe the forest near by is yearning for that land, I try to keep a distance between the two who knows how dangerous either area could be. Through the years, I’ve tried to keep a routine for myself to help the thoughts of giving up at bay. Although its always changing, seeing as how you have to make up for what you run out of, at the start of my routine I wake up each morning at 5am or so I think it is seeing as how I don’t have anything to keep track, following that I try to fix my hair with the hair tie that has stuck with me longer then anything else, even though its on its last thread, unlike my life it hasn’t given up yet. Once I finish I try to think about what I want to write that day, see I’m a writer I can write about anything and everything life, love, happiness although some experiences are too far in between. Today shall be about what its like being homeless with no one around. I won’t lie somedays I feel like this is what I was meant for, some people would think its sad, but I enjoy it I have had more experiences in life then many others. I know what to do in case I’m intruded by someone or something, if it gets to cold outside during the winter I can start a small fire with whatever is around and I know how to keep it under control keeping me warm ,since I don’t have a coat and although some may, “why not go to a shelter” don’t realize that shelters only offer a certain amount of help and aren’t as safe as being on your own in the real world. The weather today feels like a mix of humidity and rain, don’t get me wrong I love the smell of rain, the freshness of it where its gets windy and cool before it rains but my tent can’t support the wind and the rain, but as always I know its ok, I’ll be ok I’ll hide in my abandoned Walmart, all that lays in there is the empty shelves, anyways not a product is left inside. As I finish my story, yes this story, remember I told you I would be writing today. I say, “never give up even when the going gets rough because you never know if life is just testing you to see if you can make it.”

I was glad to have my beat up old black first generation truck. If you asked me, it was a classic, and tugging around my tiny little nineteen foot travel trailer, saving my ass from the lack of available spaces to rent despite the rust eating away at it, cutting a hole into my gas tank from the metal straps. Sure, I felt bitter about having to watch my home like a hawk twenty-four-seven, vigilant of the bicycle section-eight assholes who'd stride by me in the parking lots and taking a peek into the bed of my truck and scope my door out to see if it was open when they thought I either wasn't there or wasn't looking. I was only glad they couldn't unhitch my trailer and make off with it while I tried to find myself some semblance of work that allowed me to keep my trailer and truck in the employee parking lot where I knew I'd have a home to return to.

I know- I know. Everyone urges me to go to the shelter, but you haven't a clue what those assholes tell you on a day to day basis. I'm fine with the ninety days of help before they cut me off for ninety days if they don't succeed in housing me, but I don't get how I'm supposed to sustain an apartment in the slummiest city in the county with a deposit they won't pay and no way to keep me there over ninety days when every other job keeps sending me home earlier, leaving me two-hundred shy of the very money I'd need to pay the monthly seven-hundred rent for my plaster shitbox they promise is better than my trailer.

I'm not dumb. Really. And when they told me they'd help me get into the apartment on the premise of me using the sales from my travel trailer to get into an apartment I knew I couldn't maintain a rent payment on, I walked. I was seething pissed. I could have done that shit myself if I really wanted to and I wouldn't have had to prostrate myself before some non-profit where the director was always looking at me like I was some fuckable piece of meat every turn. Especially since she only ever came back when it was from one of her extravagant 'caseworker training sessions' four hours North of the shelter for a few days, paid for by my taxes and the shelter, but I can't get a deposit from them or three months of help to get me on my feet. Fuck me, right? Well, could be, but I'm not that desperate. To me, they were access to free washer and dryer, a meal if my propane ran out and I couldn't stuff any food in my propane fueled fridge from the food bank, and maybe a little friendly - it was palatable enough - company without getting judgmental looks.

Oh, it all sucked, but I was glad to be single... And not a woman. Not that I have anything against them, but I just can't get behind the amount of sexual harassments the girls at the shelter get over a man like myself. I know I'm young, not much close to thirty, but I'm far more capable of keeping myself from being a victim than a woman. I'm not saying I'm sexual harassment free - I mean... I shudder just every time that fucking bitch of a director looks my way because I'm sure she's the most flee-ridden thing in this whole place no matter how much makeup she puts on and her breasts plump out of her bra, but I ain't stupid. I know a crazy bitch when I see one and they usually look like unicorns.

Still, living from parking lot to parking lot is nice. It's like we form our own little caravan, and most days its relaxing talking to the old cats on social security who tell me I'm a young buck and to stay away from the cheap hookers no matter how hot... But they secretly whisper to me that they toss bills at them anyway, like their guilty vice is only okay in secret even though they denounce it publicly when they talk to everyone else in the lot full of caravans.

I feel like I'm getting used to it. This roaming 'neighborhood' of sorts. Of familiar faces, of the days I spent hitching my trailer and towing it from South on up to the Northern end of the state, about an hour and a half from the shelter to my temporary working position until the end of the working day where I drag it back down South out of sight of the city-folk and out under some shady pine, maybe poking out between them sometimes when I get kicked out of a Walmart parking lot when the owner comes charging out. Sure, it sucks getting treated like a drug addict when I can't even drink most days because I drive too much and I don't want to wreck my only ride and home, but the theft part stings. I've never stolen a damn thing, but they're all the same and I'm being judged by this SNAP-recipient asshole working for the big blue and yellow dicks that like to hand their new-hires a form to fill out and a day between work to head up to the local Social Services office for benefits. Fuckheads.

We're in the same boat, only I'm not some desperate cock-sucking Walmart prick. Nah, I'd never stoop that low. I'd rather be jobless, watching my money dry up in gasoline then ever don one of their fucking vests. I'd rather risk some shady shop paying me under the table, working me long hours, and risk breaking my fingers and back over being one of them. We're a different class of poor and we're not one in the same. So I'll sit here on the steps of my tiny little ADU, staring up at the stars on a cool Northern night and smile at the race of white over the sky, knowing it's not a plane, and that the haze of white over the forest is the city out in the distance, calling me back to come do its bidding for a paycheck for some gas and food.

I'd rather be homeless... At least... Landless, than housed in some concrete hell. If I wanted to be in a concrete shitbox, I'd at least make sure my stay was on loan with a rack up of charges when I left after it was all said and done. You know? Jail. At least here I can be at peace, pick my group of trailer park travelers and meet a few new people along the way. It's different out here... Like I'm not entirely in societies rut, you know? I don't remember society having a quiet pocket until I stepped into this place, the one I'm here in now.

I find it strange, the safety of it. Not what I ever expected when I thought of not having a roof over my head. I worried about so many things before now. I worried about my past, my future, about so many facets of existing, I worried about worrying too sometimes.

There's this need to be perfect. Good enough. Satisfactory for the world. I've seen it on TV. I've seen it in random comment sections where everyone is arguing to be in the right, not the wrong. Homophobes vs allies, pro vs anti, on and on it goes. Everyone thinking they're right. Because they have to be. Because what does anything matter if you aren't doing the right thing?

I thought the right thing was rather direct, long ago. Because it was what my parents had done. And what the ones before them tried to do. Get a job, marry the opposite sex, have children, bring in more life onto an overpopulated planet that groans from the very weight of our selfish species.

But now here I am. Under the stars. And when I say safe, I don't mean it completely. No life path is without its dangers and possibilities and anxieties. But you have to understand the relief I felt when I came to this country and slowly but surely lost everything.

The only family I had here threw me out for being queer. In every and all sense of the world. By family, I mean vaguely blood related, not people I cared about. So I understand that those conservative bible-thumpers didn't think twice to send me away. And I suppose logically, I should have gotten a job that would've kept me afloat.

Instead, I walked. Tired of it all. The sounds of my actual family shaming me after I was outed to them ringing about in my ears. Until I came across this place. "Walmart", the Americans call it. What a weird name. A mart of walls. With this small patch of my own hidden under a distended roof that doesn't do well to cover me but blocks out the sun from my eyes when I want it to. It's cold, it's strangely always damp and I live not too far from the dumpster. I think my hands are rotting away.

But I'm happy here. Because I spend my days politely asking for money, nipped of shame because a living being has got to eat, no? I clean up around the way whenever I feel like it and though I don't know the names of the people here, many of them see me as a regular. Smile at me on their way out or in. And once in a while, when the mood hits me, I do it back out of actual desire, not forced politeness.

Don't tell Americans but they're actually sweeter than they seem to be. I understand now. That they're all as scared as me. That everyone is confused and struggling a bit and fucking terrified and holding onto the little things and or big things that keep them going.

But we're doing what all animals do. Surviving regardless.

It's like a TV show. My life must be rather comedic. Fall from grace. I've been falling from that height a very long time. I put myself up on such a pedestal as a child... There was really nowhere to go but down.

But if this is hell... I might be frozen solid and stink quite a bunch but I rather like it here. It's nice to know this is what many consider rock bottom - what a relief to finally hit the ground. It feels nice on my feet. Keeping myself afloat did such a wonder on my psyche. And now here I am at the bottom of the ocean...

The surface is so nice to reminisce from here - it felt so awful when I was above it. Now I can just smile and wonder why I thought staying was the only option.

The sand tickles my toes sometimes, too.

I'll get a job soon... Maybe. Try to, anyway. But this is nice. And this is shitty. And this is the least threatened by being alive I've ever felt; my very own place at the very bottom of it all.

How lucky am I.