CATCH & RELEASE

Winter has descended neatly upon the quaint little town known as Detroit. My comrades against sobriety and I are firmly in the trenches, the first line of defense against employment, sitting on the floor of the bando we all live in. I am arguing that we are not in a squat, merely that we are squatting.
"I feel like a squat is more ideological."
"You are an idiot." Cody, my bestest friend of convenience, is upset with me, on account of my liberal inclination towards categorization.
Our gentle companion, Carlisle, speaks up. "Tomorrow's punks will refer to this as a 'squat' but the important distinction is that we're drug addicts and not necessarily anarchists." And he's right. Only about half of us have any sort of guiding principles whatsoever. This is all to say that, yes, we were squatters, but this was indeed merely a bando.
Carlisle and I begin to joke about the finer points of Squat V. Bando attributes (squats are more likely to have a method of sharps collection as opposed to leaving them on the floor, squats are cracked and we are cracked out, etc.), when we look over and see that Cody has overdosed.
After the initial shock of losing someone fades, I say, "Check his fuckin' pockets." and we all start to do that because someone dying is the opposite of convenience and so the word "friend" burns up entirely.
I look to Poni to see if he feels bad about his brother dying, but he only seems sort of surprised and joins in. At the moment of me pondering how fucked up all of this is, my hands three Carhartt pockets deep, he wakes up screaming, and I, thinking on my feet, yell "Oh thank God, you're alive!"
Cody shoots up and yells back "What are you doing!?" in response to my hands being in his inner jacket pocket while all of this is happening. The others look to me as I've always had a way with words.
"I don't know, I thought you were dead."
"Did you do CPR??" Everyone looks to me.
"Yeah, absolutely."
"How much?"
"What?"
"How much CPR did you do?"
How much CPR did I do? What the hell kind of question is that. "A lot. You know- a ton. We- We all did CPR, didn't we?"
The boys look to me and then to Cody and then they chime in, goon-like in their deliveries of "Yes." and "Of course." Of course we all did CPR to you. Nobody has ever had so much CPR done to them before as you have right now. Cody angrily grabs at his things and stuffs them back into his pockets before fainting.

Two months pass. We are all doing drugs on the floor of this bando and then I black out and die. I see God for what I expect is the first time, or maybe second -- I imagine He imparts some kind of goodbye and then maybe an apology to you before you're born. -- and squint into the light as He gently removes a hook from my mouth.
I try to ask him a dozen questions all at once but it just comes out as a scream, and He responds by not responding at all and instead casts me back into the water which feels very in line with the God I know. But before I make contact with the surface, I see in my reflection the amount of scars along my mouth. I am sunk back into the freezing house and awake to the sound of my bestest friend saying "Check her fucking pockets."
I whip up and scream and everyone screams back and no one is seemingly more happy to see me alive than Cody who yells "Oh thank God, you're alive!" with my half-unlaced boots in his hands.

There is no moral to this story. Those people are dead now, I'm a hero to fish everywhere.

🚎🚏🏃‍♀️🏠STAY🏠🏃‍♀️🚏🚎

"I wish you'd stay just a little longer."

She does this every time. I come over, we make dinner, we watch a movie, we sleep holding one another, and then morning comes and she waits until I'm one single step out the door before she tells me she wants to have sex. And I always come back inside and we have another twenty minutes together. Then I get dressed, kiss her goodbye, get on the bus and feel this shame. This guilt.
I lay my head against the window for an hour and two transfers and think, "I'm having straight sex again." I've been out for six years now and I'm back to having the straightest sex a person can have. And I'm just going along with it every time.
Truth is I don't trust her to fuck me like a girl. She's terrified of that. I'm her starter woman. Baby's first girlfriend. It's pathetic. It's pathetic to be in this situation from either side.
So I went over one night and I said to her, "The sex we have feels pretty straight to me. Does this feel like gay sex to you? It feels straight to me."
She nodded in agreement. "Yeah, it does."
It made my heart break in my chest. I tried to hide it, but she picked up on that. I know because a couple of weeks later we fucked and she told me it was the gayest sex she'd ever had.
I went home and told my friend about it and her response was, "Well no duh, her ceiling is our floor. Why are you doing this to yourself?" Because I love her. I do.
I went back to my girlfriend's house that weekend and we talked and laughed, which was unusual. Typically there's some friction there, some leftover soreness, something I'm trying to fix or work out, like a sore arm. Like a dislocation. We're not dysfunctional, we're dislocated. You can pop it right back in at any time.
Last time it was because someone glanced at her on the bus when we were together. I told her she's beautiful, that she's always turning my head, but it only made her angrier. She said that men have followed her off the bus before, and I apologized. She was mad at me for the rest of the day, but by the next morning you could feel the sensation of the arm being corrected, the pop of it being right back where it belongs.
Tonight though we're talking about how vulnerable I am, how hard I've been trying, and she sees it. I see it in her, too. Usually she crosses a boundary and she picks at it, but I don't budge and she tells me, "Someday you'll let me in, " or "you'll trust me eventually," or "I'm gonna earn it," and lately I'm starting to believe her.
So I think, tonight's the night. I'm going to tell her. The part of me I keep from everybody, I'm going to show her and that will solve it. She'll know me and I'll be known and it won't feel like a bear trap when she wraps her legs around me, because she'll see me. I'm a woman, too. She grew up rough. We both did. She'll understand.
I look inside myself and I see broken glass and alarms, fire, fire, fire, holding my brother in my arms, and I shake my head and look out again. I tell her, "I've been struggling. I've been struggling to work up the courage." Not the gall or the nerve. Courage. The stomach. The spine.
Her eyes grow and I can see myself in them. How small I am. It looks almost like we are the same height.
"When I first started transitioning I moved away from the South, from home, and I wore a dress outside for the first time." My heart is in my mouth. I feel so afraid.
"I was out East. And I ate at a diner alone after a doctor's appointment. I walked to my car and was closing the door when this man's hand stopped it, and he leaned in and dragged me out." She's nodding along.
"We fought and once I got on top of him I just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. I got up and I kicked him once or maybe twice in the head. I don't remember exactly. And then he stopped moving. Just didn't move anymore." I fight to keep from crying or vomiting, from showing any weakness at all.
"And I got in my car and I left. I drove all the way back home, the whole fifteen hours back to Mississippi."
My girlfriend takes a moment to digest what I'm telling her. She stares through me and waits to see what I do, and then she does what I'll always remember, for the rest of my life. She smiles.
"You're funny."
It's like a bullet. The words drip with spite. I don't say anything and just look at her, confused.
She continues, "Do people really fall for that? Come on." I push it down.
"Yeah, " I smile. "Yeah, they do." I'm laughing now. I'm pushing it down and I'm laughing - We're both laughing.
She walks me to the door and says, "You're so easy to read."
"I am." She kisses me.
"I know you so well." She never will.
"Yeah, you do."
"Do you want anything?" It was a good effort.
"Nah, I should probably head out." Truly.
"Yeah?" Honestly.
"Yeah."
"Okay."
"I'll see you when I see you, Kat."
I take the first step through the doorway and out into the city when she grabs the sleeve of my jacket. I turn around mechanically, habitually, as she works her way down to my hand and squeezes, and then I look up like always to see her eyes, to see myself in them. I don't think I've ever looked so small in all of my life.
She smiles gently, both her hands around mine now, thumbs running over my knuckles and says, lovingly, "I wish you'd stay just a little longer."

ON STARVING TO DEATH:

Me and my friends live outside, or on the threshold of in and outside. Luck of the draw. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but food (around 98% of edible food, what doesn't end up in a dumpster that we then pick clean) is inside.
Once upon a time food was exclusively outside, but Death and destruction brought about by invisible lines you could only dream of (as the mighty already did) determined that the food must now be brought *inside* at any cost. Now what? Your stupid ass is outside where somehow there isn't any food. The solution is a simple one, thanks to our own visionaries and fellow unhoused pioneers: We are going to go inside and bring the food back outside.
I was elected by the other four to go get the inside food and, through sheer bodily force of will and tweaker agility, make it outside food again. Easier said than done.
We reached the conclusion that I should go by a glorified cursory glance at the overall physical makeup of the group. I am a drug addict, absolutely, and my genetic disposition to fear has not yet been eroded entirely by use of amphetamines, which is a bad thing at this specific avenue at this specific point in time. Which may give you pause if I'm the only thing standing between you and hunger, I get that, I'm not mad at you, but if you were in this situation we could either give you drugs until you're brave or alternatively wait until you're hungry enough and watch fear shed neatly off the ketotic mass like water does a duck. We don't have drug money right now - we don't have any money at all, actually. We are going to starve to death. Unless:
The plan goes like this. I walk into the soon-to-be-victimed spot (a grocery store) and I take the inside food up off the inside and run the inside food back-ways out back into the outside so it's outside again, and then we are going to survive another three or four days off the then-inside-now-outsided outside food. It's almost guaranteed.

Unless.

Yes, I'm afraid to tell you our town had only three grocery stores within "walking" distance. No buses, no cars, too dirty to hitchhike, too nervous to kill. This means we are all painfully and intimately known entities to the employees, owners, and the newly christened "loss prevention" whose entire job is to make sure the only way we can eat is in a jail cell. What's a girl to do? The answer was watch The Hurt Locker on DVD.
My squatmate's dad saw the Hurt Locker on TV and liked it so much that he tried to reconnect with his son by inviting him over to watch it. Naturally five of us are watching this piece of shit movie and the only thing I could remember is seeing Jeremy Renner in his dipshit anti-bomb astronaut suit and thinking damn we have to do this. We all pile into our friend's dad's van and begin the drive to KROGER('s).
It's January in the midishwest and it's cold, which is normal. What's also normal in January is wearing layers and layers of clothing. What is abnormal is keeping those on once you're inside a heated building, which means that there are two elements to this heist: disguise, as well as time. The crew wraps me in many a jacket and cargo pants and sends me inside to push a cart. Pushing a cart - an industry term - if you're unfamiliar, is when you push a cart.
It was going great. I waved at everybody. Everybody waved back. Everyone is your friend when you're normal. Nobody knows you fuck for housing and eat out of the garbage. Nobody knows you're committing a felony level amount of food theft right now.
I thought of Christ to steady my pounding heart as I put 30 apples into my shopping cart like a fucking weirdo. For some reason my mind drifted to my ex-girlfriend and how she had a crayon drawing on the wall of her childhood bedroom of the Challenger rocket exploding and a bunch of crying faces in thought bubbles coming off of the rocket mid-explosion. What a fucked up thing for a child to draw. What a maniac- Oh, that's LP. Ah shit, I don't look normal. I look like a homeless guy but in more clothes. Right. Right, right, right.
My neck breached the fog of war and there was I, literally slamming my cart into this guy's crotch because of how nervous and out of it I was. I think he was saying "hey there, buddy" when I got his ass and then he screamed and put his hand behind him like he was grabbing a gun so I yelled and shoved the cart forward more and I guess he just tripped over his own feet because he fell backwards and I just tried to push it past him, but because his legs were now under it I was just kind of doing some low level vehicular homicide, high level assault with a not very deadly weapon, type shit. I kept trying to pick it up and push it over him, but he kept kicking and rolling around, acting like he was caught under tank treads in 1938 France, so it just looked like he was being killed slowly while steadily being dragged towards the store entrance under my shopping cart. The exit was maybe fifteen feet out, and I'm having a panic attack so I just shove the cart hard enough to clear his legs and booked it for the sliding doors.
My guy, the world's bravest security guard, thinks he's lost his legs I guess because he's now threatening to shoot me and I have no idea if that's a possibility or not because I didn't actually see a gun, so I naturally capitulate to the adrenaline hitting my fear-addled little rat-like tweaker brain with a hammer, sending me running, legs numb. I was about six inches through the doors when I ended up rotating my body forward on the handle of the cart, slamming my face into the groceries.
The carts wheels have locked. They lock now. Nobody told me this could happen. I've never experienced it before. It's happened since, I know what to do now, you just lift the back wheels off the ground and shove, or pick up the whole cart if you're double-teaming it with a beloved friend, but none of this knowledge was gifted to me by God in that moment, probably due to the nature of the act.
All I could think in that moment in my several-days-into-hunger-and-withdrawals haze was that having the cart lock on you feels like how that teacher must have felt getting blown up aboard the Challenger, and that a child should do a crayon drawing of this, frowny faces scribbled on the apples and rotisserie chickens in my monster shopping cart.
So I drag the cart onto the iced over concrete, and I drag it through the snow, and I drag it over to where the van is parked, and my friends get out and we turn it sideways and dump the food into the back and go home, which is outside, and we eat the outside food that once was inside, and three days later when we run out of food we do it again, just at a different Krogers.