Stray Days

I planned to write about the toxicity of body positivity and the negative social journey of gaining weight and losing weight. However, outlining the idea in my head Saturday afternoon leaving (my favorite place in the world) Mission Gardens, a stray dog was walking along the road. Usually, I don’t stop for strays; however, I unintentionally made eye contact, and she stopped when we did. This made me stop because most strays are afraid of a human in a car, at least in my experience, and yet she stopped. It meant that she was desperate and willing to trust anyone at that moment because she had nothing to lose and nowhere to go. I felt that. I was once like that, desperate and in need. I’ve been homeless before, and it was a choice I made over being persecuted for my sexuality. I couldn’t not help her at that moment because what if, what if no one had shown me grace during that time? That’s all I needed to project my emotions onto this odd-looking and sounding sweet girl. I named her Momma.

I ended up bringing her home and giving her some food and water. Fortunately, I keep dog food and treats so I can invite my dog friends over, I mean my friends and their dogs… JK, kinda. I’d already reached out to people looking for resources to treat her wounds, as she had an irregular gait and bleeding in her ear. However, after the first hour, while she was grateful for the food and water, she definitely wanted to go. I let her out a couple of times to take her to the bathroom. She kept trying to get me to follow her and even figured out the direction where I found her (to be fair, we were only about 1 mile at the shortest distance, and dogs can smell as far as 12 miles). She needed to get back for her mammories and the puppy’s sake. I called Mashath (means: Moon) to see if she would go with me, as she happened to be there for part of my interaction with Momma. She came over; we went to the area where I found Momma… Long story short, I think she wanted us to stay, but her baby daddy charged and attacked us, and he was a Pitbull with no collar. I did my best to keep us all safe by using my cane as a perimeter and innate dominance to keep him at bay, aka Auntie Magic. None of us were injured, and I even made it out of the field without falling. Do you think Momma knows where I live now?

Interestingly, this weekend, homelessness came up on Friday night, and I didn’t recognize this theme’s entanglement throughout my weekend until it came up again on Sunday night. I made more connections. I recently found out that one of my new friends was also homeless at one point. He announced this while sitting on stage at the Fred Snowden 50^th anniversary in front of a couple hundred people. Wow, who knew we had that in common? It’s not common to have been homeless and to meet people that were homeless and became homed? Is that a word? It is now cause I just wrote it. Homelessness seems to be one of the most shameful things that can happen to a person. In fact, so shameful that a relative tried to gaslight me into believing that I was never homeless and that I always had a home because their door was always open. They didn’t like me saying that without ever acknowledging they were the reason I didn’t go to their “open door,” Just because it painted them in a bad light didn’t mean it was untrue of my lived experience. Most people that end up homeless have a family. Circumstances and differences keep them from going back. Those differences can be for any of our protected rights as citizens to an array of other reasons and even sheer pettiness.

The reasons why people end up homeless have less to do with said reasons above and everything to do with our global society. There is technically a home for everyone in this country twice over, and it’s always had the capacity. Yet, my friend and I have been homeless before, at separate times in the history of this country. Which is fucking sad. I didn’t clarify this, but generations separate me from my friend. How the fuck is it 2023, and there’s still homelessness?

How is it that any of us are alive on this fucking planet, and there’s such a thing as starvation? Homelessness? Slavery? Third-world poverty in America? Discrimination? Racism? Global warming? Oh, wait, I know… colonization. Conquering is a silent illness, and it affects everyone. It’s in how we consume, hoard, placate, and lie to ourselves about what’s happening in the world. We have most of the answers to solve many of the problems we created thanks to the illness of conquering, yet so much is idle. The most straightforward answer and fastest route to making those changes lie in one simple idea, Land Back.  

TBC