At this point, I am not where many people are or would be at this point if this were a real thing. I sit in the AC while the Southern sun blazes outside. I have just finished eating a doughnut from the Dunkins up the road and I am drinking coffee from Starbucks. Still, where are the people now who really will be homeless this time next week. How many people are sitting right now, pouring over a mound of bills wondering what they are going to do for food and shelter this time next week?
As a sometimes writer, I have always been more facinated by what causes a story to unfold and what happens after the close of a story than the story itself. What were the events that led up to where we the viewer or reader enters the story. When one sees a man on the street, digging through the trash, we think for a moment about what may have led him there whether it be drugs, alcohol, mental illness or something of the like. Then the thought is gone. Whatever it is, it has to be said that it is something more complicated than that.
In all honesty, this part is hard and scary and I know that I will face quite a few challenges in the next week. Will they be as many and as deep as someone who has no or very little chance of changing their circumstance. I can back out at any moment, but the person who is truly in this situation, 4 days prior to being homeless, is slowly watching the options dwindle, waiting for the knock at the door and wondering what calls they can make. They know that the moment is coming and they are looking around, trying to figure out what they can take with them and what can be left behind.
Some people have deeper and different problems than that. We can say that there is a person for whom the world does not make sense and at this time, they are dealing with it, but how? This person does not know how to deal with what is going on and the people around them do not know how to deal with them. Often, like a filter, they are slowly wicked away from the all that they know and see as familiar. They may have started in a loving family, and then, with the onset of tragedy and or mental illness, they are drawn away from that family, that security. So, then the slide continues to cheap apartments, group homes, shelters and various permutations thereof until finally, the street. Through various institutions that do not or cannot take the time to get to know them, and in essence, place a band-aid on a bullet wound by medicating or simply staying the problem until finally the person is sleeping in the street,
I am an avid camper and outdoorsman, I am sure it will not be the same. I feel like I am cheating, when I walk around Atlanta and I look at all the places where I could "hide" and sleep safely. It is not cheating, really is it? How many people walking around me are thinking the same thing. How many more people around me are week from being on the street?
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