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How Being Homeless and Alone at 16 Made Me Strong
Stay hungry my friend.
I’d grown up being sort of passed back and forth between the families of my drug-addicted mother and my sporadically present father. I found myself homeless at sixteen, hoping to make it through the last couple years of high school and somehow find a way to college.
During my sixteenth year, I slept in an abandoned house a friend had told me about. It was next to the neighborhood park and at that time there were no other houses near it. I remember that I had to wait until late at night to go there so no one would discover that I was sleeping in the house. Most of the windows had been broken by neighborhood kids throwing rocks and it smelled of urine.
In Houston, the winters are generally mild, but you do get the occasional cold front, and besides, when you’re living in a house with no windows and no heat it doesn’t take much to make you freeze. I slept inside a walk-in closet so I could have a smaller area to try and keep warm. The doors had all been taken, so I hung an old blanket I found at the doorway of the closet to keep some of the wind out.
After school, I worked with a small company that paid commission to sell roses on street corners. The pay wasn’t much, but it let me eat most days and I was able to buy a jacket after a month or so. In…
