Sometimes I look at my life and think that it is completely different from 5, 10 to 15 years ago – that’s because it is - dramatically so. I see friends who have friends from primary school, high school, college – but this does not seem to be me. And if I do have friends from these times, they weren’t the best friends, the blood sisters. Those people are gone. Because that person – who I was – is gone.
At the not so tender age of 16 I left home to go on one of the most wildest adventures of my life and even though I spent the majority of that time wishing it would end – it gave me a life experience that I don’t see how else I could have had. These times were slightly dangerous, unsteady and very sad – but it was an experience.
I lived with three women and things were crazy. Crazy. Like, bat shit crazy. The parties we had were unbelievable – we did rituals, we streamlined people, we talked about Ray Bradbury, living in L.A, we sung. We lived in a three story mansion, we lived in a two bedroom shack, we had a saab – of which I rode in the boot of more than one occasion – we drank bottles and bottles of whisky – we were psychic, we were witches, we were classy broads and we were total bitches.
My friends – who were on the outside looking in, again the ones not too close – called us the Cult.
One day, we found ourselves one day without a home. The man who had been courted over the internet – threw us out.
Fuck a duck – who saw that coming.
Gobsmacked, down to our last fifty bucks, we were homeless.
Homeless.
I had always pictured the homeless to be old, slightly demented – fermented – forgotten. But I was 17. A little demented and fermented I guess, but this is one of those things you never think would happen to you. Especially when my nose was so high up in the air, I couldn’t see where I was going.
I wore black pants, white shirts and suit jackets. My hair was red – bottled red – and I often sported huge, acrylic nails. I thought I was pretty top shit because I worked out how to insert tampons in while still wearing these amazing claws.
I smoked like a chimney, swore like a sailor and I drank like a really big, thirsty fish.
So, homeless. We went to the crisis centre and remained quite calm. After all, once you’re at the bottom, there’s no fucking use in panicking.
We had a lot of missing documents and there was no explanation as to why I was with them ( they were related, I was not ). The man – I have no idea what his title would have been – had nothing for us at that time, he suggested we find a friend who has a spare room, a shed or a garage. He completed our dress thought, we were the best dressed homeless people he’d have ever seen.
We were pretty proud about that, it like we had achieved something.
Homeless, but still classy.
For weeks we went from one unhappy home to the next – we laughed when we got screamed at by an alcoholic, we baked chicken in a vegetarian household. We spent our time desperately looking for our own home and looking for money.
And then one night we got a call – they had found us temporary housing – ‘transitional’ housing it was called. Though they only had enough room for three, because legally, I shouldn’t have been there.
