Three years ago, I was 26 years old, down to my last $12, and walking home in the rain after giving away my only food to a stranger on the street. I spent that whole miserable walk wondering if I’d made the stupidest decision of my life. By the next morning, I had my answer.
The year everything fell apart, it fell apart completely.
I lost my job at the design firm in March, my apartment in June, and my boyfriend somewhere in between — he left the way people leave when they realize the version of you they signed up for no longer exists.
I just packed what I could carry and moved into a room in a shared house on the edge of the city, the kind of place where the heating worked on its own schedule, and nobody made eye contact in the kitchen.
For three years, I survived on temporary work — data entry, filing, and the occasional short-term receptionist job that went nowhere.
I had been halfway through my degree when the money ran out, and I kept telling myself I’d find a way back to it eventually, but that particular lie gets harder to maintain when you’re checking your bank balance before deciding whether to take the bus or walk.
On the afternoon this story really begins, my balance was $12.
I had just finished a two-day filing job downtown, and I was tired in the specific, heavy way of someone who is always tired.
I stopped at a deli on the way to the bus stop and bought a sandwich — turkey and swiss on sourdough, four dollars and change — and told myself I would make it last. Eat half now, save the rest. That kind of arithmetic had become second nature by then.
He was elderly, sitting against the wall of a closed pharmacy with his legs stretched out in front of him, and a paper cup near his knee.
What struck me wasn’t the cup, the worn coat, or any of the things that normally register when you walk past someone on the street.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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