I’ve written this column from lots of different places and different situations, but this is a new one, the only time I have had to write this column one small half step away from homelessness.

I came back from Tennessee with my health much worse off due to the nature of how I spent the last two plus years between the pandemic, my father’s death, and a year plus of taking care of a person who purported to be dying in hospice but in the end left me in a way worse situation than she found me in.

It started with my health and ends there too.

I cannot physically work enough to afford the cost of living (especially now and especially in my current location), and I waited through three years of appeals and being poor beyond belief while my father was still alive to make applying for help like disability or housing seem a bit of a waste of time.

Recently it got so bad that as I have no official status where I’m at, I might have had to sleep on the streets.

That is the kind of thought that really puts things in perspective as far as how fragile some aspects of daily life really can be.

As you put your head down to sleep you find yourself thinking what would you do without that spot, when the day is hot as Hades and you’re having a hard time ambulating you start to have thoughts of how it would be if you had nowhere to rest, and you start to think what you would eat if you had no place to store or refrigerate food.

All of these thoughts, every damn one of them, is scary as hell.

What can you do long term to solve this issue, especially without a ‘base’ to operate from, how can you afford to pick yourself back up in a world where cost has gone insane.?

Again, scary.

This latest slip down the slippery slide happened as I was writing this article, so of course it bled into the content of said article. but also this means I have no ending to the tale, no moral lesson, and no way of knowing what happens next.

For now anyway.

Only thing I can say about this experience so far is it is very much a time to reframe and to reevaluate.
So far I have as said reframed many luxuries we all take for granted as things that are more fluid than I had thought and also re-evaluated how much one very special person means to me and how to look at all they do (and that’s in print too).

I hope the ending to this story or at least the next chapter is way more upbeat and light hearted than this one.

Another thing about being so close to the bottom is that although, of course, it could be worse, there are also numerous ways that it could be better as well.

Let’s hope and pray for the latter…