I guess I didn’t work hard enough.

I think people forget that homelessness is more than a short story, a poem, an anecdote. That it’s more than just sleeping on concrete and soggy blankets. More than wind that bites at your face and rain that doesn’t care when you have nowhere to hide.

It’s been a lot of things for me.

At first, it was the big bad thing that would happen if I didn’t work hard enough. I guess that’s what it is to most of you reading, too. I grew up with the threat of homelessless looming over my head. It stalked me, breathing down my neck, waiting to sink it’s teeth in. When I was fifteen, I was just barely able to fend it off by dropping out of school.

At eighteen, I did it again by getting a second job.

But that didn’t last.

At eighteen, it turned into something new entirely.

It turned into watching my little sister adjust to a new seventh grade class three times in one year. Hearing my mother cry when she thought I wasn’t listening. It’s contemplating getting rid of the dog I’ve slept next to for ten years because the only hotels within walking distance don’t allow pets.

It’s the little boy I saw at the day center who slept in a two-door car with his mother, father, and 100 pound pitbull who couldn’t stop smiling when he realized all of the toys in the common room were for him. Watching his parents fold his freshly cleaned clothes, and his tantrum when he saw he’d have to go back to the car. Or the man named Kal who has been waiting for disability from his cancer by living out of a backpack and panhandling with sunburns on his cheeks. It’s the young man with a mental illness talking to himself because nobody has so much as looked him in the eye in over a year.

It’s being followed by a man much bigger than you and having nowhere to run. Becoming nocturnal, because people don’t bother you as much when you sleep in their parking lot during the day. Reorganizing your entire life in front of everyone in the walmart parking lot - including the woman who avoided your gaze when she caught you shaving in the bathroom.

It’s putting sheets on your windows so people don’t watch you sleep.

Rats eating through everything you managed to salvage from your old life.

People you used to love, the people who you thought were going to catch you telling you that you’re being too pessimistic, that your sadness is wrong and people lifting you up only to hold it against you.

It’s asking for handouts when you really need them, and feeling like a leech for needing them in the first place.

You can’t trust anyone. Nobody is there to help you, no matter how many times you call that one phone number they give you when they tell you that they’re sorry that they can’t help you.. The one you’ve called half a dozen times already, the one with the man on the other end telling you to just work more hours, to just get a job. The one that doesn’t understand that it’s impossible to get a job when you have to take care of a thirteen year old, a disabled mother, and a mentally unstable self that never had the chance to learn what it meant to be human before humanity was ripped away from you.

I just wanted it to end. I sobbed when I was alone. Even as an atheist, I started begging God to fix it. I was begging for the world to change. For me to change. For there to be a God so he could pluck me out of my body and take me somewhere that smelled like books and incense rather than piss and kitty litter.

I had a key to the lockbox that we had to keep away from my sister. I would unlock it and think about all of the reasons for my story to be over. It kept getting worse when I asked for it to get better. When I thought I was on the ground, demons scraped their way up and latched their talons into my flesh and started ripping in their attempts to drag me to hell.

I thought about how much money I’d cost my mother and sister that day. How much of a mess I made. How much space I took up.

I thought about how after I was gone, they’d be the ones to find me, and it would shatter them. But, maybe then, someone would help them. Maybe someone will pity them and with their burden lessening a whole person...

I’d stare at the bottles of pain pills prescribed to my mother. I’d picture how it would feel for my body to be numb, starting with a slight tingle at my fingertips. My eyelids getting heavier, and my lungs screaming with the strength it takes to keep my heart beating for just a few seconds longer.

The hollow feeling in my chest when they fail.

I’d stare at the blade of my razor and think about how easy it would be to take apart and slide across my skin… the color of blood staining the ground, proving that I was here.

And when I signed on the dotted line, I thought that was the end. I took a picture of my key, and I cried out of joy for the first time in what felt like a lifetime

But on that first night, when the lights turned off, and I was left alone… My relief turned into guilt.

That little boy was still sleeping in his car next to his dog the last time I saw him. Driving through Seattle, seeing tents under bridges and knowing that there are people - children inside. Knowing how close I was to being them. When you see a homeless person, you see the mess that they create and the tent that they live in. What you don’t see is their entire lives within those walls being ripped apart by people who don’t like to look at them.

That’s the part that really broke me. The part that sent me to stare into my mother’s medicine cabinet again. Why am I allowed to move on from the agony of uncertainty while children had to endure it for half of their lives?

The answer is simple enough.

I’m not.