Homeless
posted by saurabh in Travesty |This is the most uprooted I’ve ever felt in my life. Moving from the East Coast was bad enough - I’ve lived in the frozen northeast more or less my entire life, give or take a few blips. West-side I know far fewer people, and even if I found the ambience of New England festering and odious, I at least knew the smell of it. Not that I mean to suggest there is something off about the air in California; just that a clever dog is wary of unfamiliar scents, and being wary for long periods soon grows tiring.
I returned a few days ago from an eastward jaunt. Previously I was staying in sublets, but now I don’t even have that. My belongings are all bundled up in storage, and my carcass rests at night upon the sofa-shaped largesse of my friends. This is a pretty meager, middle-class impersonation of true homelessness - the situation is temporary, I could procure an apartment almost whenever I wanted, and it’s entirely of my own volition that I find myself in these circumstances in the first place. Still, it’s surprising how unsettling it is not to have any home of my own.
I’m off to India in a few weeks, where I’ll no doubt encounter thousands of homeless street kids who have never had a home of any sort, and don’t even know what it means to have a haven. And I’ll curse my own good fortune for the bitter pity it arouses in me.
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Perhaps when you have a place of your own again, you will occasionally look back and wish you could return (temporarily) to your days of being so utterly unattached.
I hope so.
Come over this week.