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She called for her husband to come and have a cup of tea with the man she had met down by the river who lives in his car. The husband wouldn't come out from his workshop. "Sorry, when he gets focused on his work, you can barely talk to him." I wondered if he was aspergers. She later confided to me as we sat in her own personal workshop, me drinking my coffee, she drinking her tea, us chatting about our teaching experiences. "He doesn't trust homeless people". "Oh, okay." I nodded politely. Seemed irrational. I still wondered if he was aspergers. I wondered later:
What is a homeless person? I have been homeless for almost 20 years of my life. Homeless? Is the home I left at 18, and returned to occasionally over the following years the same thing as having a house and calling that a "home"? I have lived in houses, I have lived with flatmates, I lived with home addresses, but 'home' was where I left my parents. Home has never been my own place. Until now. Six weeks ago, after the last flat I lived in didn't work out, I decided to forego moving into another house that I would struggle to afford rent for, in exchange for living in my car. This way I would save on overheads, such as rent and power. I knew that if I did move into another house, the cost of living would simply force me into finding more work just to pay for those expenses and drain motivation to work on writing, and potentially compromise the work I had one day a week - it's rare to find an employer who is happy to let you go to another job one day a week! Why, I asked myself, did I always move into houses when they rarely felt comfortable and left me feeling like I didn't belong? Because they weren't homes. For 20 odd years, houses were just rent factories asking for my money. Home is where the heart is, My heart is in my chest; A chest is filled with treasures, Treasures are keepsakes for the self. Self is where I dwell. My home is me.
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