the rix mix

from Wandering Scribe, a blog by a homeless woman living in her car around London. She writes the blog on public library computers, showers in hospitals, manages to wear clean clothes & not look "homeless" & apparently lives an isolate existence, but with a large blog readership that includes other people in the same situation. She'll be alright, since she's becoming something of celebrity & that will bring her a good literary agent.

Woke late again this morning, and reluctantly. Drowsy and disorientated. Don’t know why but my head feels both heavy and light-headed the last few days, like a balloon, full of water. Very odd. Takes me a while to realise that the sun is beating down on the car and that the laneway is full of voices. Feel drenched in sweat, uncomfortably hot and itchy all over, my hair plastered to my head and nylon sleeping bag tangled around me. Lay there separating out all the children’s voices tumbling down the laneway towards me, from all the birdsong, before half-raising myself slowly and squinting out into the bright yellow light trying to locate the voices. A group of women, all of them in white t-shirts, with walking sticks and rucksacks and fleeces tied around their waists, are walking towards me from the top of the laneway. Children are everywhere, stamping and squealing. I wriggle back down into the sleeping bag pull the drawstring over my head, lay still and wait for them to pass. People always do, eventually, and I’m used to doing it now, especially these brighter mornings, and when I sleep late – which seems to be more and more these days. I wait for the voices to fade completely and then wash my teeth and face with the last of the bottle water, get dressed quickly and walk up into the trees to have breakfast: milk and oranges and triangles of cheese and a big stack of Fig Rolls, that leave me feeling bloated.

I came perilously close to homelessness in early 2004. My rent was more than my income at the time, & had at best been at least 50% of what I was netting from full time work during most of the 90s. Fortunately, I knew about the experienced social workers at Bridgeway House in Elizabeth, who had helped me through a rough period on an earlier occasion. My oldest brother was homelessduring 2004, despite being a Vietnam vet; his bizarre experience included going directly from from the homeless prevention program at the Lyons NJ V.A. hospital to a shelter in a Newark. Once he got into that vets program, I had assumed he was safe. I was very wrong. His story is sadly common.