Home is where the heart is. I remember when my home was a person and a handful of desperately clenched ideas. I had lost everything that felt like me, except for art, adventure, and a stranger who convinced me to stay atop a bridge. Art became my reason to live, but to be... (1)
...alive, you need a home. My home was transient. I was a freshman at #PNCA when I survived sexual assault. After months of secrecy and unhealthy self coping, I told my mum how I had been raped. I had been a virgin by firm choice, with truly zero inclination to have sex... (2)
...yet my mum's response was to say that maybe I had deserved it. Then she told me to get out. I no longer had a dorm room. I no longer had any room. I was a college sophomore and homeless. I slept in bushes, trees, parks, elevators, atop buildings, on docks, under bridges... (3)
...under food carts, and once under a tarp on a stadium field. I went home with nice strangers and unruly teenagers to sleep on their floors, or in closets, or in garages. When it rained, I broke into abandoned houses, mildewing cars, and once the back of a parked semitruck. (4)
Sometimes I would sleep overnight in restaurant or hotel bathrooms, and make myself look presentable in the mirror before I left after they reopened. I used the sound of the early trains in downtown Portland as my alarm to get ready for school. I still love train whistles. (5)
On nights before class, I never wandered far away from Fairless Square, so I could take the trolley back to my college campus. I'm still upset that #Trimet ended Fairless Square, because for me it meant access to education, and sometimes even survival when I was homeless. (6)
Once, out of boredom, I attended a high school I was not enrolled at, and drifted class to class to soak in lectures and information I hadn’t paid attention to when I had been younger and just trying to get perfect grades. Learning had been secondary to memorizing back then. (7)
This school’s History class was the most fun. I was sent to the Principal’s office when I kept correctly answering every question that teacher posed until he realized I was not on his class roster. They made me call my mum to ask which high school I was supposed to be inside. (8)
She told them I was already in college, so they asked me to leave. That summer, in an Eastern Oregon desert, I came face to face with a cougar. I had been living out in the mountains there, sleeping in canyons in good weather, and in caves when it rained or snowed. (9)
The big cat waltzed right into my camp before I ever noticed it. I heard somebody step onto my tarp, and I turned around to see sleepy yellow predator eyes. Earlier that day I had attempted to climb a rock face above that camp site. After I saw this cat... (10)
...the next thing I remember is being on the very top of that precipice, with my teddy bear clenched in my teeth. With adrenaline still wired through my body, I watched the cougar paw through the canned food and pot and my backpack, and then lazily saunter away. (11)
I was thinking today about how I never seem to have much to say. People think of me as a scatterbrained daydreamer, head empty or in the clouds. Yet, when I stop to remember my past, I have several thousand stories to tell. My life has been short, but my past is long... (12)
...and convoluted, and I have a great and terrible weight upon me to share my vast experience with the world. I want to write books. I want to draw comics. I will dream my dreams. I am going to turn my life into art and give it to this world. This is my reason to live. (13) (END)
Thank you for reading this short bit of #memoir I wrote today, titled When My Home Was You. This is my true life story. This is only a grain of sand on the shore of my future. These thoughts are leading me to understand who I am, where I am, and all the places where I can now go.
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