*The Guilty Pleasures of the Homeless, Taylor Rose Elliott

The Guilty Pleasures of the Homeless

by Taylor Rose Elliott

I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased. Then again, I don’t know a thing about my illness; I’m not even sure what hurts. -Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground (Christmas 2018) He was homeless for a few months at one point, sleeping in a borrowed van or maybe someone’s apartment. Homeless in Charleston by the rising seas, playing drums with a band that practiced in a storage unit; it was too cold, though, for him to live in there with the guitars. I could tease him about his wandering for a while, joke that he is a true romantic now, but I know that then he didn’t even believe in love. Or maybe he just hadn’t felt it yet; there’s no way to know the difference now. On the boardwalk, somewhere around Christmas day, he gave up and left that town, along with the piano he didn’t even play. He still brings it up sometimes; he is still disappointed in himself, saying that leaving his piano was a waste of money and time. That was a year or so ago. Then he was twenty-two, living in a wooden house that felt as if it was nestled in the woods, even though it was only a hundred feet from the road. There were drafty, dreary unfinished rooms in the back that were almost underground, and I begged him to let me paint murals on the blank, dirty walls. He didn’t even turn on the heat here until I started coming over every day, because he knows I’m always cold, but I would never let anyone lend me a jacket. Then, on Christmas, under a xeroxed picture of mistletoe, he told me that he might believe, now, in love. I told him I wanted to, but I couldn’t let myself make anything of it. But we kissed on the porch on that unusually warm Christmas, and I told him that I’d go on this ride down with him anyhow. I tried to cover those unfinished walls with every beautiful thing I could think of, and I hoped that, when his ears started ringing and his eyes grew sore, I left him with some goodness to think about. He kept telling me that I’m the best, most beautiful thing he has, and I felt the same way. The problem is, it was hard for me to believe that not everyone will grow tired of me eventually.

I reminded him so many times that first month that I am a mess and I usually can’t surrender my hands, or my mouth, and I don’t know if I have any feeling left to give at all. I told him I have a habit of disbelieving, I have these terrible habits of getting scared that everyone I love hates me and forgetting how to breathe, forgetting the light switch is right in front of me. I kept reminding him I can’t always be here, and my hands aren’t always warm; I kept apologizing for taking the time he needs to sleep with all the

words I’m remembering. But he just rubs my wrists to calm me down, and assures me he is a strong man who can do without. He plays the drums, he works with his hands, for work he crawls underground beneath the houses almost as much as he stands. While we held hands in our coffee shop, I looked at the dust on his knees, and I imagined a dark, murky place with only the punk bands inside his head to keep him company. Once, he didn’t eat meat for months, as I haven’t for years, just because he knew that it was something he could do; now it’s something he did. Maybe it was for me. But yet he tells himself it’s okay to be okay with never waking up someday; sometimes he asks me why humans want things if they are sinful, after I told him it wasn’t okay to make a habit of hating anything, especially himself. It’s not okay to deprive yourself just to see what happens. But he kept telling me it was okay. He will keep convincing the world he is strong enough to go without. He worked late and he stayed up later, even when I wasn’t on the phone to live in his ear. He believed I loved him, and I think now maybe I did, as he did too. And one cold day under six blankets I asked him why there were little blades hidden in his bedside table, his kitchen, all over his house, blades silver and shiny and many sided like the green blue of his eyes and the gray in his smile. I thought we’d both left it all behind. And I asked him if he thought he would ever be happy again and if there were such a thing as eternal happiness. I asked him if he had been taking his medicine; I asked him if I were the right person to be moving things around in his house and his life. Even today, sometimes I feel as if I need to fix everything, all at once; so I rearranged everything for him in a way that seemed fixed in my eyes. I think he knew this is one of my things I worry about; he knew I’ll follow people down if I think I can save them. So he just told me again that he is a strong man, he is a caring man, as long as he has money and strong hands and love, these other things, he can do without. Still scared, always scared, I swallow pills as my throat closes. I know I will feel better—I know they will make me clean and empty inside—they will not heal me, but they will force my body to forget fighting for now. I knew then that he wouldn’t stay, because I was too young and brave. I know he stopped taking the pills because it’s hard for him to believe that anything that changes his chemistry could be better than “staying strong” and “going without.” If he’s sad then he’s meant to be sad, right? But the blades left scars when he was thirteen; I ask him, “Is that not change?” But as I complain he said, “When it rains

it is meant to rain,” and so we stay inside and watch horror movies all day instead of getting a sunburn, and scraping our knees falling off our skateboards. And we pretend our thirteens were different. And that we were not still the same. So, in our times inside, he kissed my head and asked me why I worry so much, why my hands shake. He said against my pressed lips, “Babe, of course everything’s gonna be okay. You need to sleep, you need to forget, this is not a healthy state you’re in. You can’t go without peace,” he said. He said that everyone else is not my responsibility. He forgot to put up lights for Christmas and then left the door open after I left; I convinced myself it’s just going to have to be okay that the cat ran away. “There’s no need to get a new one because it will leave too.” That’s what he said in his gray thermal shirt, pressed against my cheek as I traced his tattoo with my finger. He changed the subject, looked down at the tree on his arm, and he said he was going to get an X inked over the roots of it. He said it was meant to represent the feeling of that empty wandering that he would never be able to explain. I asked him, “But why would you take the roots away?” He was homeless; half by choice. He wanted to see what it would feel like, and he didn’t care anymore. I told him that’s not a healthy feeling, and he said to me that pain is almost better than happiness; it feels good when something good happens on its own. But “if you let it slip, if you give into the inertia of that hole in the ground, under the roots under the fall leaves, if you fall just to see what is at the bottom it will only get worse,” I told him, only in my notebook. Sometimes when I looked at the gold amongst the green in his eyes, I thought about how I lied, and I let the sunlight shining through the green branches let me forget. I realized I was a liar somewhere amongst the x-acto knife in my painting kit, amongst my three houses and zero homes, somewhere amongst the baby pink constellations I’ve crafted so intentionally and carelessly on the palest part of my arm. So, realizing my sin, I told him that I understand why he wanted to be homeless, because sometimes I wallowed too, but that we needed to start believing now, remember the belief we had once before: joy, God, goodness, and sleep, and talking to his mother; these are not things he should force himself to do without just to prove something. He is a builder, he is so competent with his hands, he builds houses every day late into the night. I reminded him, he’ll never be homeless again, and he stole my hand back from my tracing of the scars on his hands, and he brought it to his lips. “I never fixed the clock,” he said. “But that’s just because you want to trick me to stay,” I said

to hear him laugh. But then I reminded him we needed money, and I needed to get a degree, play guitar, and read. Naps can’t last forever, and when we woke up we would be bored with nothing to do; when I’m bored for too long it feels like I am trapped underground, like those mines I explored once in Georgia, and the air is so thick I can’t breathe enough to even walk out of there. He just squeezes my hand and tells me I’m really pessimistic for someone who’s always reminding him of belief. I remind him again of the things he shouldn’t go without. My mother asked me what he did before he came back to this town, and I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her. Can I trust her because she put me to sleep once? Or am I justified a lie because she left on the night of my senior prom and left that hideous ugly purple bed empty. Am I justified a lie because she left me crying outside her bedroom door for years as she waged with my father war upon war? I remember once she told me that she hated that house the first time she saw it, but she didn’t have the heart to say, but the day I came into it, it became a mansion, a crystal mansion, and I knew then that I might have been the reason she grit her teeth and stayed for a while. But I also started to wonder in which battle or war did she decide the house wasn’t beautiful anymore; in which fight did I start to fade? Was I the one who caused it—I did—and how long did she have to pretend she still had reasons to stay? I sit here, sorry, making sure I am sorry enough to feel sad again. She probably left because I was strong enough to go without, right? But in my strength, did I make her weak? Now, it’s hard for me to imagine a beautiful crystal house or light at all when I visit the fist holes in the wall and the big bed and the tear-stained floors. Then, it was enough just to kill time, to go back to his house and in his hands and his misunderstanding of happiness and my fighting determination to go without it, and try to blur the complications of this anxious attachment with something I refuse to classify. I joked at 3am that maybe now I’m just as homeless as him. He laughs that concerned, boyish laugh, which is what I wanted to distract me, even if just for a moment. As long as I don’t start believing that it’s mine to keep.

I know I might just have to start believing myself, sometime, one of these days, because every time I begin to believe it feels wonderful, but then I get scared and can’t decide whether or not it’s worth it to continue. But, it’s okay to be homeless for a few months, right? I know—we need to know—there is an “old enough now” to decide when to start listening to therapists, taking our meds to stop following thoughts down. But floating around is the sign of these young times, right? There is water here, but while I try to figure out which one is safe to drink, I can be a strong woman and go without. I am young, strong, afraid to be homeless, knowing it’ll hurt me, but telling myself that it’s a good time to do things that I’m afraid of.