unhoused (unfinished.)

I’m watching someone I love walk slowly into homelessness. It’s having me face a part of my past that I thought I washed away but truthfully lives in every thought and decision I make. It’s why I don’t own a television. Why I slept on a futon for years and why dressers don’t hold my clothes. I won’t ever throw away the suitcase I’ve owned since high school because it can carry enough wares to cover my body for a week and the framed photograph of my parents. Not too heavy, can be stowed under a bus or above my head on a train. 

You carry only what you can. How fast can you clean up a room or apartment space? How quickly can you move? I’m not putting a television out on the side of a road for trash pick-up. Done that before. It’s a painful reminder of losing a home. Homes of childhood and ones I will never again call ‘home’ because the grief became too much. 

Folks have a hard time believing that I’ve once been unhoused and transient. I know why. I’ve heard why. I come off too responsible. I don’t speak back to the voices only I hear inside of my mind. I don’t smell of alcohol. All of these belabored stereotypes of what people think the unhoused to be. It was none of those things that led me into a season without a home even though I think those around me would feel better to know that they helped someone struggling with ailments that are visible. It was pride. I didn’t want to let my family and friends know that I was on the last beyond my last. 

Because Ciara is, somehow, not supposed to end up like that. 

I’ve talked in therapy about other people’s expectations of me. I remember my Aunt telling me that she “never had to worry” about me because “Ciara is always going to be okay.” She’s going to find a job, she’s going to take care of herself. Truth is that I did those things not just to take care of myself but to prove to others that I was worthy to be worried about. You don’t want to help someone who isn’t trying to help themselves. But I also come from genes that know how to survive. Cut from “kill or be killed.” My mother was homeless for decades when she didn’t have to be. Shelters by night, museums and the library by day. Come hell or high water, we’re making it to the morning. 

I wish I could transmute that into something positive. 

Being here is a result of community; of people who came looking for me when I didn’t show up to church two Sundays in a row. Those who put out a call for spare rooms to hold me until I could get on my feet. For friends of my father who allowed me to sway aimlessly for a week before I could return back to Pittsburgh. The twenty dollars in my account that paid for my bus ticket. The sweet souls who didn’t let me pay rent even as I blew all of what I had because survival for me doesn’t teach responsibility. A God who continues to intercede on my behalf. 

You grow tired of telling that story though. All of your life isn’t about the downs; there has to be a few ups. Has to be. So I stopped. I’m not all of the trauma and circumstances that plagued me. I changed my phone number last year because I wanted to rid myself of the burner phone that someone gifted me when I first got here. Doing that cut off contact with all of the people who helped me. Running from my past has consequences.