With no place to go and you're left all alone (there's no place like home)

There’s a freedom that comes with having the bare minimum, such as a phone with few contacts but voicemail, no real reason for having one except for the simplest application a phone can have these days: the camera. That's not to say it's not helpful to have amenities such as an internet connection - it most certainly is, but that's something the public library can provide. 

The freedom is that nobody can want from you what you don't have - it doesn't matter how determined the homeless people are to pry open your wallet if there's nothing inside said wallet, no cash for them to exchange for lunch. Of course, that means you don't have cash for lunch either, but you don't necessarily need it. No, you're luckier than the homeless people who hang around the library harassing patrons, although you try to remind yourself how easily you might become one of them if you're not careful. 

When you live off of pity, you have a delicate balance to maintain - remind your benefactor too often what they're rescuing you from and they might decide you're not worth the emotional labor; forget what you've escaped, and when they return, they'll send you right back to the unwanted embrace of your family. 

Not that they're doing this for you, of course; really, you're doing them a favor, watching their cat while they're off doing an actual job. You're cheap, after all - all you ask for is a place to live, and all they really require are pictures of the cat to ensure said cat is actually still alive and not dehydrated the way their roommate had once left them. You're not abandoning this cat - not only would you have nowhere to go if you did, but you have nothing better to fill your camera roll with than pictures of Fluffy anyway. 

Fluffy at least is the type of creature other people want to look at, unlike the other creatures you enjoy photographing. Bees, beetles, wasps, flies - if it's small and capable of movement, you like capturing images of it. You have a knack for appreciating what others refuse to, it’s a blessing and a curse. Blessing in that you’re not in competition the way landscape photographers are; curse because you’re easily misunderstood, people hear you say spider and start stomping without listening to why you mentioned the creature in the first place. 

You’re living in a house of strangers, in a city you don’t belong in. You don’t belong anywhere really, not the way you belonged back home. You try not to think about it, what you’ve let happen. Someone who has lost everything, if that was you, wouldn’t that mean you once had something valuable? What you had wasn’t worth what you had to endure to survive it. 

You belonged beneath your brother’s body, his lips on yours, his hands on you, in places cameras can’t capture; you didn’t have anywhere you could go - your parents didn’t listen, asked you if you would rather he touch strangers. You would. You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t want him to be molesting anyone - you don’t want him to be molesting anyone. It’s just, you just wish you were also anyone, that what happened to you counted to your parents. 

You shouldn’t be thinking about where you’ve left - you’ve left, after all. It’s just, at least there you had reliable access to food; you had a shower even if you feared using it more often than not. His eyes weren’t actually making you dirtier, not the way the city you live in now is. Not that it’s anyone else’s fault but yours - you choose to avoid the shower. 

You come back from the park sunburnt, skin screaming angry red, but you prefer the pain of an empty stomach to that of a mouth filled with his tongue, his hands on your neck heavy enough the sun’s rays replacing it have become welcome. At least you can wear a hat to protect yourself from the sun. At least you’ve left him behind. 

Your gallery app on your phone is a testament to how empty your life was before: photos predominantly of spiders, flies, bees, and moths, which filled your phone but not the majority of your thoughts the way they do now. Your thoughts still perseverate in places you wish they wouldn’t, places the cameras can’t go, but, removed from the source of the problem, they fill less of the space in your existence, making their presence less of an occupant in your clothes. More of your camera roll reflects what you spend time doing, thinking about. If someone combined your phone usage with your extensive editing history on Wikipedia, they could reasonably piece together what your days look like now. That wouldn’t have been possible a month ago. A month ago you were writing depressing stories about the stages of grief and now you're writing about one of the few parts of life that brings you joy alongside the loss of everything.  Photography, flashes of life outside the verbal banality of humanity. 

You're always mourning the loss of everything,  your life split jaggedly like a ripped piece of paper between Before and After. Jaggedly, like the film stripes your Dad used to bring home after a summer spent taking pictures you couldn't see on a disposable camera - the photo-paper never ripped cleanly the way it was supposed to. Time doesn't rip cleanly either, this space between existing as a student and Whatever Comes Next just filled with uncertainty. 

You fill the uncertainty with pictures of city birds: pigeons, sparrows, robins, Boston’s infamous ducklings we all ought to make way for, a great blue heron. You fill the uncertainty with words, pages of Wikipedia species you verify the validity of with informal research anyone can do on the internet, since you’re not a student anymore. You're confined to open access information sources, but luckily that's becoming more and more of the world's information sources. You wrote words too, describing this time of loss and limbo, a precipice between living inside the confines of an abusive household and the barely existent freedom of not fitting into the charity spots you're offered. You're writing at three in the morning because the memories of everything you've lost always return in nightmare form.