Friday, February 1, 2019

The Recall...



Memory Hold...
Losing the Fight of Recall


Memory slips When you live on the streets, living without a home for
the better part of your life, things start disappearing from thought
and memory recall more and more. As your life centers more about
survival and instinct, you lose the ability to recall what used to come so
naturally, now no longer able to pull forth the words, thoughts, memories...
and they become lost forever in the tidal wave of living without a home.
For the very fact that life on the streets is wholly consuming.
And consumes you whole, while at the same time depletes your entire being from
the inside out, picking apart your life and body until there is nothing left to
pick apart, and it has wiped out any vestiges of who you were.

You lose yourself and your Self on the streets.

The simplest things fall to the wayside and recall is no longer an option.
How to make something in the kitchen (or make-shift kitchen outside using restroom
sinks for clean up and the tables and rocks for cooking on) that used to come so
naturally is lost entirely. And not only things from the kitchen, but from life itself.
The very basics of living become harder to recall.... did you eat or not, have you
cleaned up or not, didn't I need to use the restroom, or not, or did I go. And you
find you can no longer easily answer these questions.

Life becomes measured by each breath taken, and what you are looking
at in any given moment. What that noise is around you, the scents you detect.
The weather. This is what your life transforms into when you have been denied
living in a real home for a great portion of your life. Everything that had been
has ceased to exist in any realm of the present.

Recall, something that used to be no problem, has become a real problem.
Sometimes you can feel the slip of things being removed, other times.... it goes away
unnoticed until you try recalling something and find it is no longer there to recall.
Words lose their textured meaning and become little more than sound in spoken
language, and marks on the page.

And the longer you are forced to live without a home, the sooner you cease to exit.
Becoming nothing more than an afterthought, at best.

Living in the streets for so long and continually denied any and all assistance,
I can no longer tell where I end and the streets begin, and vice versa. As we
have become one in the same. And really the only thing I am known for now, or
rather what I am known for..as nothing more than a circumstance....
an iconic landscape for all intents and purposes.

So does life even matter?? A resounding NO when you are viewed as nothing
more than a circumstance of life, not a living, breathing Human being.

Living on the streets becomes a full time job, one that we are never paid
for our time or services, but endure the most grueling hours. And the only
ones who appreciate the work, are those of us out here, living and breathing
the streets 24/7, every day of the year. The sacrifices we are forced to make,
the concessions. It never ends. We keep going until there is no more going,
and at that pointing, we no longer have to worry about anything; about
whether or not we will be able to eat; what, how and where to eat. If we are
going to be warm enough through the night, or have to deal with the elements
of nature and nature herself. Animals, insects, elements of weather, finding places
to clean up, etc. Or ever have that treasured space called a H O M E.
Because at that point, nothing will matter anymore.

And not only will our memories no longer be needed nor recalled,
but our lives will not be recalled or remembered,
because after all....
we are only a circumstance, nothing more.