How much matters, everything or nothing?

"There goes I....."

A man passes by, walking down the street, he's very old, very frail. At least, he seems to be.

I'm in the break area at work. He walks past, pays me no mind. I notice his backpack, I swear this must be the biggest backpack I've ever seen, I start to think about my own time living on the streets, how much I hated the weight of the straps on my shoulders, my back would ache from it, and I was fairly young. I look at his bag, as I said it's very large, larger than him even, and it's barely hanging on his shoulders. His back is hunched forward, like a turtle, and the bag is his shell, God it must be SO heavy. It must have everything he owns in it. I wish I could lift the weight off his shoulders, but I can barely handle the weight of my own.

I've spent a lot of time with the homeless, as the homeless, and with them in my peripheral, sometimes you'll encounter a man screaming out in anguish, sometimes yelling at a tree, you have to wonder what's happening in his mind.

I once knew a girl who'd spent 20 years of her life on the streets. In public, she was just the nicest, sweetest person, but in private you'd see the damage that still lingers. She was a lot of times very hostile, bitter, always thought there was a plot against her. If you have a traditional bank account you know this but from time to time they’ll send you a new debit card, she was a hoarder and was always on guard about her stuff and never opened her mail. Instead, she had a chair with mail piled to the top of it, and spent all of her spare time at the thrift store going through all of their clothes so she could add on to her pile at home of stuff she’d never use or wear. Every surface in her apartment was stacked to the ceiling with thrift store stuff. I used to say she did that so no one would have anywhere to sit and wouldn’t come over. She believed one time that because there was a purple mark on an envelope that she’d gotten a new debit card in and I had a purple lighter, that I must be conspiring to get the numbers off the debit card without opening the envelope, like pressing the envelope with the lighter to see the numbers, I guess, I wasn’t by the way, also she hadn’t activated the card, and didn’t plan to, so it would be the dumbest plot in history.

The act of being on the streets does something to your mind, there's some parts of your mental faculty that you'll never get back. I came to understand this then. She was funny, smart, had made it off the streets, had a nice place to live, a nice job, sober, but was so afraid of going back that if her bank account dropped below $1500, she would start selling herself again, like she did to get by when all she cared about was finding the next hit. She was terrified of ending up back on the streets and that was her solution. It was like a glitch in her mind and, I’m not sure if you ever come back.

I was in a halfway house with a man, he was an older man, had just spent 11 years of his life straight in prison, because while being robbed, he smacks the gun out of the guy’s hand and stabbed him, he lived, but Al went to prison. It was in the very small, very country, very white town of Munfordville, KY, coincidentally where I went to high school. Definitely not the type of place that would cut a black man some slack on a violent crime. Al was the coolest, he had the most unique voice you ever heard, very deep, very gruff, like 40 years of cigarettes and booze gruff. We would leave the halfway house every evening and go downtown looking for something different to have for dinner. When I would fuck up, he was my harshest critic, but you could tell it was because he cared. I hadn’t seen him since those days, while riding the city bus one day I heard that voice, he was going in on somebody, I looked around to find him, sitting at the back of the bus, by himself, talking to no one. I said, “Oh shit, Al, how are you doing?!” And shifted to a seat closer to him, he started talking to me like he remembered me, but soon it seemed he didn’t, and he was telling me about someone who wasn’t there as if they were there, by the end of the conversation I found out he’s been living in streets. He has a big bag next him, which surely contains all of his belongings, he said he was “on his way to work and almost missed the bus” then without saying bye got up and hopped off at the next stop, it was definitely not where he said he worked. I like to think he recognized me but, outside of talking to me like he knew me, there wasn’t much to point to it. No telling what that guy has seen since we were in that halfway house. At least he’s still alive.

I believe we're all, not very far away from Al, or the girl with OCD, or away from the turtle man with the heavy backpack, we're just one too many bad days away. Hardships accumulate on our conscience, at first, they strengthen it but too many and it begins to erode, breaking away the foundation on which it stands. It all matters, every hardship we’re subject to counts, some people’s immune system is stronger than others, but we’re all subject to being a woman, shrieking at no one, or a man digging in the trash for something that’s going to pull him out of this, my father, who at one point was absolutely positive that there was a new species of bug that was eating his skin. What I’m saying is that could be any of us.

I must say that a lot of my mental faculties have returned since I’ve been clean, but maybe I haven’t spent my allotted number of bad days, I don’t know. These are simply observations.

Susan, who is the love of my life, my best friend, and soul mate, has a saying, it might be from the Bible but it's the basis of what I believe empathy to be, and when she says it, I feel it so deeply, "If not for the grace of God, there goes I...." Before you judge anyone, remember that could be you, or your son, or grandpa, just as easily as it isn't.
Thank you for reading.

Jordan Lee Canter

, Editor-in-Chief,

Declaration of Liberty