I Got Off Of The Bus Three Stops Before Mine And Walk

I go home and prepare my bunker and call my wife and tell her what happens in Italy. She says sheep be home soon.

I weave myself through the animal-made track, slipping on loose stones and running into the occasional webbed trap. Eventually, I make my way to a clearing with scattered belongings and a stool sized log surrounding a scrap wood fire.

“It’s not fair,” I huffed, “I don’t want to leave! This is my home!” My mother’s brown eyes stared back at me, filled with a knowledge and understanding I had yet to possess and would lack for years to come. She left the barren living room, leaving behind a trace of the fruity perfume she always wore. It was futile to argue; the boxes were packed and ready to be loaded onto the trucks in a few hours. Having nowhere else to sit, I descended to the floor. The light oak wooden floorboards that used to be clothed in rugs were now naked. In the next month, new pairs of feet would walk on these boards.

Awaking with the knowledge that the room I had slept in for the past six years would not be the same room that I would rest my head that evening or for six more years was a hard idea to consume. After taking the final morning stretch and dressing for the day, I awaited the moving truck to make its presence known in front of our big yellow apartment building surrounded by a white picket fence. While waiting said truck we began to finish packing our left over dishes and clothing. During that time, I returned to my room I began to take down my posters, plastic ceiling stars that I would stare at every night and ponder the future over and pack them into a nearby crate. I was thirteen at the time of the move and a recent graduate of elementary school, I remember feeling like such an elder, but I assumed that I would graduate elementary school, go to one of the best high schools in my area, and then go to college in New York so that I was not too far from home but finally had the opportunity to fulfill that need for difference I always thirsted for as a child. It was when the back of our moving van was opened that I realized that I would not get to obtain any of those goals and that it was best to move forward and begin to accept the new

How would you feel if one day you lost everything you own and you're forced to live in the

The tanks were approaching, I need to run. I flee as fast as I can towards the northern mountains,

Shelter is a fundamental human need. Imagine not knowing a place called ‘home.’ You spend each night, uncertain of the weather, on a bench, which serves as your bed. As you wake up to chattering noises each morning, you worry about which public place will allow you to clean yourself up. When you get hungry, you go to a soup kitchen, beg people for change to eat a cheap meal, or search the nearest garbage can. For the rest of the day, you sit in busy areas hoping people will notice you and want to help out. You realize that you are not judged by who you are but what you are. The situation described above is the typical description for homelessness for about 600,000 homeless people in the United States on a given night (“State of Homelessness Report”). Some of them sleep in shelters, others on the streets; roughly one-quarter are children (Crane et al.). In order to understand and prevent the complex issue of homelessness, one must first learn about the various ways through which a person could end up without a roof over his or her head.

How would I handle a night on the street, without shelter? Am I better, more worthy, than the man who uses a newspaper for a blanket and a McDonald’s bag for a pillow? Would it be a harder blow for me to find myself without a roof over my head? Suppose I had caused my own homelessness? Suppose I had not?

Before being homeless, I was just a normal school girl. I had turned 17, and from the outside world; it was like I was on top of the world. I had

When I stepped out onto the street I checked my wallet and in it I had thirty three dollars, not enough to hail a cab back to the condo and too many miles to venture by foot. My only other option was public transpiration. With head held high, I walked to the nearest bus stop and waited. When a bus arrived, I polity told the driver my objective and then asked him what I needed to accomplish in order to arrive at my destination. With a smile, he

$2,400 just for rent? Can I still keep going with all these bills? Looking outside clouds start to cover the sky. I go to turn the lights on and accidently trip over a box on the floor. Why is this box even here. I open the box to see my old high school varsity jacket that I got from tennis. My mind is immediately flooded by memories of THAT game, the last game for my sophomore year tennis season.

It was a cold autumn morning when I heard the news coming from my alarm clock radio. Two people had won the lottery winnings from yesterday's drawing. They get to split a great prize, both people got to take home over 3 million dollars. I have been playing the lottery for about ten years now, I have only won three or four thousand, hoping to hit it big. For eight years I have been cleaning and cooking in a half kitchen with dinette. The small apartment had that smell as if something had been wet and moldy. I have had to listen through paper thin walls of, shouting, fighting, and the occasional grunts from some dirty old man upstairs. The constant running trains echo inside the entire apartment building. The living room was just big enough for

You arch your eyebrows and go to retrieve your sword. Maybe you can get something fun out of it too. You push the bushes obscuring your view out of the way and take a look at who you’re dealing with.

You stay put and make your shelter before dark. Coming to the party prepared is important. Rescue teams will find your point of entry and work from there, but if you start to aimlessly wander to and fro, their job becomes harder, and your chance of survival lessens.

As I walked out of my nine-story apartment complex, I saw an interesting array of faces. Mixed genders, some male, some female, all very different deep down inside. I study their faces, wondering what it'd be like to walk a day in their shoes. Some people are like open books, you can look at their facial expression and instantly guess what their emotions are, yet others are like locked diaries. You can't tell what they're thinking and you'll probably never know. I shake the thought out of my head as I rummage through my pathetic excuse of a handbag, pulling out my most recent bank statement. Thirty-two cents to my name. How do I live like this? My train of thought is lost as my mind ponders elsewhere. Do you think people can tell I'm a broke