Are You Homeless?

Something I recently read...

     The first thing you notice when you're homeless is how long the nights are. It's hard to realize that a night can be so long; but in time you get used to it. You don't really sleep, especially in the beginning, because you wake up every fifteen minutes worried someone will come upon you. Your imagination runs wild with what terrible things would happen if you fell asleep and let that happen.
     The world at night when you're without shelter feels like the Twilight Zone, another dimension, another planet, where the normal laws of time and space don't apply. When the sun comes up, you're so happy knowing that soon people are going to be out and you'll be back in the world again, on terra firm, although you're tired and worried about how fast night comes again.
     Before you know it, you're seeing the shops close down, lights diminishing down streets, cars becoming fewer and fewer; on residential blocks you enviously watch working mothers and fathers pulling into driveways, arriving home to their families; and you stand outside talking to them in your head, saying, Don't go inside, not yet, stay out a little longer!
     Your hearing changes as the general noise of the workaday world goes silent and other sounds become more pronounced. A car engine sputtering. Tires squealing around turns. Even sounds that are far away: distant trains, speeding cars, gunshots, police and ambulance sirens.
     Soon you get used to the night smells. You may notice that broken glass has its own smell. The various smells of wine bottles - Thunderbird, Night Train, Boone's Farm - mixed with the other varieties of liquor and beer are distinct, too. These smells compete with the smells of rats, wet plaster, and rotting wood, the smell of a hollow place. And you can hardly avoid the recurring smell of human feces and urine.

     Another thing about homelessness is that you lose track of what day it is. Without structure, Wednesdays feel like Saturdays, one week is no different from the next. Events of yesterday blur, often out of sequence, and no matter how you look at it, the day is never long enough because, when you're by yourself, your main preoccupation is night coming.
     Night holds a separate world that can be far more brutal than sleeping in abandoned storefronts and alleyways and on park benches. It is the criminal business world where hardened humans prey upon the weaknesses and misfortunes of others, a world of hustlers, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, and murderers; a world populated by men and women, many of them young, who lost their way a long time ago. The night is host to this soulless world where parents loan their children to deviants for drugs or whatever else satisfies their empty hearts. This is a world you may never want to know, but it's a world that exists; it exists everywhere and probably has always existed.
     When you're homeless and you're a kid, that world is waiting for you and always on the lookout for new recruits. If you're a girl, God have mercy on you. If you're a boy, God have mercy on you, too. Depending on what kind of boy you are, you might survive; but if you're a girl, probably not. You don't need an invitation to come in, doesn't matter what you look like: fat, small, black, white, tall, Chinese... if you can breathe, if you're young and homeless, you're drafted.
     Usually, you cross the threshold unaware and you're there, already a part of it. It's ready for you with a well-worn training program that dictates what you're going to do, when and where you're going to do it, and what will happen if you don't. So you do it - if you don't want to be homeless and lonely, if you want to eat, and if you want to avoid the seemingly endless nights and the smells and sounds they bring.
     In my opinion, homelessness is preferable to being sucked into the machinery of the night. As a matter of fact, I think everyone should experience being homeless and going without. You get a different perspective on everything and a different appreciation for everything. You come to understand that you can be living in a house and still be homeless... 

And after telling the story of how he ended up being homeless at the age of seventeen, the author concludes:

     This is how I spend my first night on the street. It will not be my last, now that I have passed Homelessness 101 and learned the first lesson about why you become homeless. Not necessarily because of hunger or lack of shelter, but because of fear; because sometimes outside is less terrifying than inside.

                                                                                   - Excerpts from Finding Fish (by Antwone Fisher)