by Brianna Karp
“Er…the trailer is a bit messy…of course I want to help out another homeless person…but, you know, it’s kind of embarrassingly messy….”
“Really, it’s OK! We’ll take care of it. We don’t mind at all!”
I felt like the worst kind of hypocrite. I was going to deny another homeless person temporary shelter because I was afraid that someone would find out I’d been pregnant? I sighed and told Sage that she and Emese could go ahead. I hoped that Emese would just sweep the test into the garbage with a bunch of other random stuff without noticing, so that I wouldn’t need to talk about it.
A couple of days later, Sage emailed and tactfully brought the conversation around to asking if I might perhaps be pregnant. “I was. I miscarried in Scotland.”
Instinctively, she seemed to know what to do. She told me how sorry she was, and then changed the subject. She didn’t leave room for self-pity, just buoyed the conversation onward and upward. That was Sage. Ever true to her name.
Just before Valentine’s Day, I checked my email inbox and my heart stopped. There was a message from Matt.
I clicked it open, and there was only one sentence.
“Please accept that it is over, and perhaps we can both move on.”
Emails began to roll in from the Homeless Tales crew. He’d sent them all two-line emails, before he even emailed me, saying simply that he and Brianna were no longer together, he was sorry about the website and he’d be in touch. There was no further explanation of any kind. I had no idea how to answer their questions. I didn’t know myself. For my part, I didn’t know what exactly I was supposed to be accepting—or why—or where he’d been or why our lives had just imploded.
Matt responded to my pleas for an explanation, after a couple of days. He was staying with Lori’s family for the time being. They were together as a couple and were moving on. He was sorry: If it was any consolation, he hated himself right now, and knew that there was absolutely no excuse for his behavior, but his decisions were final and irreversible. He hoped that we could remain in contact and stay friends. He had very fond memories of our time together, and hoped that we didn’t have to hate each other. But, he added, he had to request that I not try to come find him. He didn’t want to involve the police in this matter, but if I came looking for him, he’d do whatever was necessary to protect his family.
At no point did he acknowledge the specifics or the magnitude of the events that he’d set in motion. He spoke in vagaries, as though it had all been a mere unpleasantness instead of having nearly killed a woman. A woman whose hand he’d held, whose eyes he’d gazed deeply into and promised to marry.
What?! What was he talking about? What had happened? “Protect his family?” I had never threatened him or Kelsey or even Lori in any way, and now he was acting paranoid when he was the one who had lied, who had abandoned me, who could have gotten me killed. He’d disappeared and sacrificed all of us on the altar of his selfishness—his crew, his friends, and me…the woman he said he’d loved more than anything. For all his supposed love, it was easy enough for him to trade my life as a mildly regrettable casualty, just to make his choices easier. I was shocked to realize that he’d rather stay with a woman he claimed to pity and loathe, just so that he wouldn’t have to stand up for himself. And he “knew there was no excuse?” Fuck you, try anyway! For all the havoc he’d wreaked, the least he could have done, I felt, was try to come up with an excuse, no matter how pathetic! He wanted us to remain friends? Fuck him. He could take his fond memories and shove them.
There would be no friendship, I told him. Indeed, why would he wish for us to remain friends? So that once Lori and he imploded, I’d still be around for him to weasel back into my life, so that I could support him again? Did Lori have any idea that he was sending this email? It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when he sent it. Wow, nice going, waiting until Lori’s asleep to send a conniving, pitiful email, hoping to keep me in his life. I guess it was good for them to know they could trust each other. Oh, wait. They couldn’t. Return my belongings to Vicki Day’s address, immediately. My laptop, the engagement ring I’d bought and the Christmas photo album. The baby clothes he could keep. I no longer had any use for them. Go back to your whore. Douche bag.
He responded defensively that, by all means, I could go ahead and hate him. I was certainly entitled. He back-pedaled rapidly, angered at being called out. He didn’t see any reason to keep in contact—it was just a gesture. A gesture? I had a gesture or two for him myself.
He would send my items at some point, but not until he was good and ready, he continued. He wasn’t in Huntly at the moment and didn’t know when he’d find the time to get back there and send my things.
I knew he was lying. He definitely wouldn’t have left without at least my laptop, at any rate. I responded that I didn’t care for his pitiful excuses. He would get himself on the first train to Huntly if he had to beg, borrow or steal from Lori’s family—I didn’t give a flying fuck. But my items would be in the post immediately, unless he wanted me to call the police and charge him with theft. The ring, especially, could land him in a lot of trouble, I knew. I still had the receipt for it. There was no room for negotiation. He should have thought of that before he knowingly told me to wait for him in a snowstorm, and then left me to die.
As for hating him? Ha.
“I don’t hate you or love you. I nothing you. You’re worthy of neither hate nor love.” It was a lie, of course. I both loved and hated him. But he was no longer entitled to the truth from me, I thought wildly. He’d fed me nothing but lies. I hoped he choked on them.
“Vicki Day and Jon Glackin will facilitate the return of my belongings. Don’t ever contact me again.”
Jon Glackin was in London, coincidentally, meeting with some English street folk in preparation for World Homeless Day, a global event we were coordinating, to take place on 10-10-10, catchily enough. He had amassed supporters from all over the globe, even including several high-profile celebrities. We were hoping to make it into an annual event, geared toward raising homeless awareness and combating negative, judgmental stereotypes.
Yet, he proved himself a true friend by putting much of it on the back burner to walk me through the next several days. We met up in person in Camden, and hugged like old friends. He was furious with Matt, and disavowed their friendship to high heaven. He was sickened by what he’d done. He’d make sure that Matt returned my things, and right quick.
Vicki wrote to Matt, instructing that he send my things back immediately, and that no excuse would be accepted. He didn’t even do her the courtesy of responding. It was awfully chauvinistic of him, I found myself thinking, a quality I’d never before seen in Matt.
Instead, Matt tried his luck with Jon, calling him “bro,” and speaking intimately as though they were still the best of friends and allies. Jon was displeased by the feigned chumminess, and Matt’s underhanded statement that “Obviously, Brianna and I are having trouble communicating effectively at the moment”—the intimation being that I was the silly, overreacting woman who just couldn’t accept a breakup and move on. Women, eh? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
What Matt didn’t know was that Jon had asked to read all the correspondence that had gone on between us thus far. He wanted to know the full situation before taking a stand against his former best friend and I certainly understood. For all he knew, I really could be a woman just having a hard time dealing with a breakup. Once he read all our emails back and forth, though, there was no doubt. Jon took it very personally that his “friend” would not only treat his wife-to-be that way, but then try to play it as though he’d done nothing wrong, as though it were all perfectly sane and rational and understandable.
Jon ripped into Matt, and after reiterating that my belongings must be returned, ended his email with the following statement:
“You left our friend Bri out in the cold, at the mercy of nature, and relying upon the kindness of strangers to get by. For a ‘homeless activist,’ that is sh
ameful for sure. ‘Bro.’”
The following day, I began to receive emails about some story on me in a Scottish tabloid called News of the World. I was confused. The News of the World writer, Siobhan McFadyen, had contacted me several weeks earlier and offered me £500 ($810) to interview me and Matt for a Valentine’s Day story. He was still missing, and I still had no idea what was going on at the time, so I told her, “No, thank you. He’s busy with personal matters at the moment and I’m doing business in London. But, again, thanks for the interest.” Besides, Matt had already told me, back when we were first navigating the media storm, that News of the World was a cheap rag of a tabloid, the British version of the National Enquirer. We didn’t need to lower ourselves to that standard, he’d said. We wanted to keep our reputations clean. The paltry amount of money it might bring in would never be worth it in the long run. It would only tarnish the opportunities for advancement that legitimate, reputable news outlets would hold out. I agreed with him.
The writer had apparently gone ahead and contacted Matt. And he had accepted her offer. I located the article. Matt and Lori posed with Kelsey in a baby carriage. Most of the article was complete fiction. The writer quoted anonymous “sources close to Brianna”—none of whom existed. These “sources” were clearly bogus because as far as nearly everybody in my life knew, I was OK. McFadyen and her colleague Nicola Stow created a completely botched time line of events that included me coming to Scotland to be with Matt for Valentine’s Day, and him dumping me. To be honest, simply by reading my blog they would have gotten closer to the truth. For months, my readers had been aware that I’d come to Scotland to surprise Matt for Christmas, even though I’d played everything cool as though it were all going swimmingly. The writers even got our ages wrong.
“There was no infidelity,” Matt lied to the tabloid. “We just broke up—that’s life…I’m back with Lori for now.”
The for now caught the attention of a lot of people, though I suspect it flew right over Lori’s head. In her photo, she looked thrilled and somewhat bewildered at being photographed for a tabloid. It was probably the most interesting thing ever to happen to her. Looking at her dull face, I almost pitied her. But not quite. They deserved each other.
The writer concluded by quoting an anonymous source: “[Bri] is devastated. She feels really foolish.” I didn’t feel foolish, though. How could I? I had believed I could trust my fiancé, the one person I loved more than anyone in the world—a completely normal assumption, right? It had never occurred to me that there was any other option.
The tabloid photos were posed in Huntly. Matt had been lying all along when he swore that he was in Peterhead, fifty miles away, and had no access to my belongings. Jon emailed and called him out on it, and for selling his morals and ethics to a tabloid—and for such a paltry sum, too. He called it the “thirty pieces of silver News of the World article,” intimating that Matt was nothing but a Judas. Matt never replied. He seemed to realize he’d burned all his bridges.
So I went back to California, kept picking up work wherever I could find it from temp agencies I’d signed up with, and used the advance money from this book to pay back Brandon, Vicki, the Bests…everybody I owed money to, who had taken me in as though I were their daughter, their sister or their friend. Me, a virtual stranger. Whenever I’m tempted to think back on the heartache that Matt caused me and become cynical, I remember all the good people who came through for me in a heartbeat, without a second thought, when my own family had disowned me, as though I’d never existed. And I realize something perhaps not very profound or original, but comforting: People in general are not so bad after all.
It had been a year since I wrote my first blog post. On February 26, 2010, I opened my Netbook and typed:
One year ago today, a very scared girl with a lot of bravado opened a plain little no-frills blog and tapped out the following:
“In three days, I will be homeless.”
As they say, what a long, strange ride it’s been….
Epilogue
I set out to write this book in a very different frame of mind than the one in which I finish it. I was excited, naïve perhaps. The world was my oyster and I felt like I was headed for, if not a fairy tale ending, at least a fulfilling one. All I wanted was a house to live in with a man who loved me, and, finally, to leave my past behind and create a life of my own.
As you know, it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Matt did send my belongings back, with the exception of the Christmas photo album. I can’t imagine what he could possibly want to keep it for, so I simply don’t. I wrote it off as a loss, and was simply happy to retrieve my laptop and ring. When I turned on the computer I discovered that he’d deleted every single one of my personal files—three years’ worth of photos, documents, bookmarks, records, contracts, tax paperwork, music, piano sheets, the templates for a vintage clothing site that I’d slaved for hours over—all gone. My memories, my life for three years, long before I’d met him, wiped away. Ben, my brilliant technogeek friend, spent days running a recovery program on my laptop. Over twenty thousand files were recovered, many of them junk and many of them corrupted beyond retrieval. I’m still sorting through them, seeing what I can save.
I haven’t had any contact with my family in nearly two years at this point, and I don’t expect that I will anytime soon. I still love them very much, as I suspect I always will. But I realize and accept that they are not going to change, and I can’t force my will or perspective on them. As a result, we are destined to live separate lives.
The members of the Homeless Tales crew have been largely supportive, and are working through their own grief. Most of them have been clear that they don’t blame me for the loss of the site and of their work, which I’m still partially compiling as I stumble across it, so that I can send it back to its rightful owners.
I do still believe in love, as odd as that may seem, even if I’m liable to be a lot more gun-shy moving forward. Maybe eventually I will find someone to share my life with. It may not be the next relationship I enter, or the next several, but I do hope that I deserve the happiness that comes with love, and that I will find it.
For now, though, I’m doing my best to make lemons into lemonade and I’m focusing my energies into pursuing my passions. As of this writing, I’m building my own company and network of websites; some of them creative, some of them recessionista-centric, some of them humanitarian. There’s a beautifully exhausting amount of work involved in starting my own business, and I’m loving every minute of it. Believe it or not, there’s very little time to allow myself to feel lonely or sad. How can I? I am constantly on the go these days, and I’ve befriended multiple people, communities and subcultures (especially online) who constantly check in to reassure me that they’ve got my back—and the sentiment is assuredly mutual.
The recession has dragged on longer than nearly anybody anticipated, and after being unemployed for more than a year, I have just started an amazing job at a prestigious Orange County theatre—a stroke of luck that has left me thrilled and hopeful. But there’s an overwhelming sense of it all being the end of an era. The world and economy have evolved and moved on in many ways, and we’re struggling to regain our breath and catch up. I suspect that even if or when the ship rights itself, things will never be quite the same. Not that I believe the economic collapse is a harbinger of Armageddon and impending doom-and-gloom and the zombie apocalypse, or any of that sensationalist, panicky nonsense that those more disposed to fear-mongering seem to drum up…just that the atmosphere will be (and this is not necessarily a bad thing) different. Americans have now collectively watched the fabled American Dream crumble around our ears, taken a major hit and been reminded in a big way, just in case we forgot, that our country and our government have feet of clay. We are not immune.
I have high hopes for Americans as a whole working together to rebuild what we’ve lost. And I have a hunch that my faith in our resiliency will be justified in
the end. One of my takeaways from a year spent navigating the seamier underbelly of the American Dream is this: If I’ve only got this one life, it’s important to me to spend it advocating for causes I believe in, and making some kind of difference in the world, no matter how small.
Brandon once joked that becoming homeless was the best thing that ever happened to me. In a way, he was right. Because I have experienced such an odd and often fulfilling journey while homeless, new doors have been opened and new opportunities created. If I hadn’t lost my job and my house, I never would have found my passion and a calling to help give others a voice. My hope is that this book inspires discussion about homelessness, and what we, as individuals and as a society, can do to end it.
It’s been just over a year since I’ve lived in a house, but I realize, with not a small amount of melancholy, that I can’t remember the last time I ever felt that I had a home. All my life I’ve longed for someplace to call my own—and not just a physical building, but a niche, somewhere that I fit in and feel a sense of harmony and belonging. While I would love the opportunity to see the world, and travel to exotic lands, I wish to do it knowing that there’s a solid, permanent base awaiting my return, that nest where a warm, fuzzy robe is always hanging on a hook for me and my dog is sitting at the front door waiting for me.
Perhaps it’s not all tied up in a neat little bow with sparkles and ribbons on top. But that’s OK; life rarely is. It’s a start. I know who I am and where I want to go. I deeply want a home, quite possibly more than anything in the world. And that’s the next, most important step for this homeless girl.
