Things I Miss
When people think about homelessness, this is often the image that comes to mind.
A bench.
A shopping cart.
Everything someone owns piled together.
It’s a real image.
It’s also an incomplete one.
My experience doesn’t look like this.
Tonight I’ll sleep indoors.
I’ll have dinner.
I’ll have a place to charge my phone.
Tomorrow morning I’ll probably have scrambled eggs, potatoes and coffee.
Homelessness isn’t one story.
It’s a spectrum.
Mine is only one small part of it.
If someone asked me what I miss, they’d probably expect the answer to be simple.
“My apartment.”
That isn’t really it.
This is my second shelter.
It’s different from the first.
Instead of sleeping in a large room with dozens of people, I have a pod.
Think of an office cubicle with a bed instead of a desk.
It’s still shared space, but there’s a little more privacy.
The food is plentiful.
Honestly, it’s good.
Staff work hard.
I appreciate those things.
This isn’t a story about how terrible shelters are.
It’s about something I didn’t realize I was losing until it was already gone.
Autonomy.
Not the political kind.
The ordinary kind.
The kind almost nobody notices because they wake up with it every morning.
This isn’t a photograph of what I lost.
It’s a photograph of what I’ve built.
A fourteen-dollar USB fan.
A twenty-dollar power bank.
A lantern.
A bottle of Diet Pepsi.
Charging cables.
That’s my personal cooling system.
When the pod gets hot, the little fan plugs into the battery pack and runs for hours.
It isn’t air conditioning.
It isn’t fancy.
But it works.
It’s one of the small ways I’ve made my little corner of the shelter feel more like my own.
You learn quickly that comfort doesn’t always come from expensive things.
I never had many expensive things anyway.
Sometimes comfort comes from solving one small problem at a time.
I’ve been sick for more than a week.
Probably a sinus infection.
The heat didn’t help.
Walking more than I have in weeks didn’t help either.
Today I realized something I never imagined I would lose.
The ability to decide that I was sick enough to go and lie down.
Not because anyone is trying to be cruel.
There are rules.
Schedules.
Shared spaces.
I understand all of that.
Understanding it doesn’t change how it feels.
It feels like asking.
Can I have a towel?
Can I have toothpaste?
Can I lie down?
Those are tiny questions.
Questions most people never have to ask.
People think homelessness is about losing a roof.
I’m beginning to think it’s about losing hundreds of tiny decisions.
The television is almost never off.
Sports.
Old sitcoms with canned laughter.
Miracle mops.
Turbo vegetable slicers.
Life-changing pillows.
Kitchen gadgets that promise to change your life.
Then more sports.
I couldn’t tell you who won.
The television isn’t really the point.
At home I could choose.
Watch a movie.
Watch a documentary.
Listen to music.
Turn everything off.
Sit in silence.
Here, it’s usually someone else’s choice.
The shelter food is better than many people imagine.
That’s worth saying.
It’s easy to write only about what’s wrong.
Sometimes what’s right deserves to be documented too.
Good food doesn’t replace autonomy.
But it matters.
Facts matter.
People probably expect me to say I’m devastated about losing my apartment.
The truth surprised me.
I’m not.
I don’t miss expensive things because there weren’t many.
I don’t miss the endless conflict.
I don’t miss fighting with Columbian Centennial Housing Society over repairs that should never have become arguments.
I don’t miss documenting notices.
I don’t miss reading legislation late into the night.
I don’t miss spending hundreds of hours preparing evidence instead of simply living my life.
I don’t miss wondering what the next confrontation would be.
I don’t miss that.
What I miss is something much quieter.
Running a bath because my back hurt.
Drying off with my own towel.
Lying down because I wasn’t feeling well.
Making coffee at midnight because I felt like it.
Watching a movie.
Turning the television off.
Going to bed because my body said it was time.
No permission.
No explanation.
Just life.
When I look back at that apartment now, I don’t see luxury.
I never had luxury.
I see ordinary routines that were so ordinary I barely noticed them.
Now I look at that little table beside my shelter pod and I see something different.
Not loss.
Adaptation.
A small fan.
A battery pack.
A lantern.
A few carefully arranged things that make a sleeping cubicle feel a little more comfortable.
They’re reminders that even when autonomy is reduced, it isn’t completely gone.
You find small ways to reclaim it.
A little fan that keeps you cool through the night.
A battery pack that lets it keep running.
A neat little table that’s yours.
Small things.
Ordinary things.
The kinds of things most people never think about.
That’s the strange thing about autonomy.
You rarely notice it while you have it.
You notice it after it’s gone.
And sometimes…
you notice the small pieces you’ve managed to take back.
Every time I pass someone sleeping outside, I’m reminded of something else.
My story isn’t the whole story.
I’m sleeping indoors tonight.
Someone else isn’t.
Homelessness isn’t one experience.
It’s many.
This is simply mine.
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