Probably when I was 19–20, right after I dropped out of college. During that time I was working two jobs and crashing on a friend’s couch while I saved up for my own place. We had a falling out and I got kicked out of her house, so I scrambled for places to stay for a few weeks and carried all of my stuff in a backpack. There were a few nights where I was stuck outside, and it was too scary and cold to go to sleep out there, so I rode buses around and went from place to place trying to keep warm, then went to work in the morning.
Later that year, after I was living somewhere, I broke up with a guy I’d been seeing for a while. He got in somehow and vandalized the place, then came back the same night and pounded on the door hard enough to shake the doorframe, yelling at me to let him in. I called the cops and suddenly he was calm and cordial… with them, explaining that he lived there and just wanted to get his stuff. That place was really shitty and I had eczema on my arm while I lived there. The police officer saw my arm and asked how long I’d been doing heroin. It was about 5 in the morning at that point, and I’d gotten off work at midnight. The question was so baffling and out of the left field, and I was so exhausted, that I just burst into tears.
Things are so much better now that it’s hard to believe that stuff really happened. It seems like it happened to another person.