Roads From the Ashes by Megan Edwards

Author:Megan Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: full time RV living, mobile work, mobile internet communications, American road trip, memoir, non-fiction
Publisher: Imbrifex Books
Published: 2018-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

I’m Nobody. Who Are You?

The day after the fire, when I was technically homeless, I remember driving to a supermarket to buy a toothbrush and shampoo. As I left the store, a man wearing a filthy pea coat and pushing a shopping cart stuffed with plastic bags and old blankets asked me if I had any change. “I’m homeless,” he said unnecessarily.

I gave him my change, thinking all the while, “You’d probably be surprised to know that I am, too.” But I wasn’t. Houseless, maybe, but homeless, no. There’s a difference, and it has nothing to do with physical reality.

Even though our business burned, we were somehow never “unemployed.” After the fire, I read in the newspaper that self- employed people who were wiped out could get unemployment benefits. I showed the story to Mark, and he went to the unemployment office to find out how it all worked.

He returned within an hour. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I walked in the door and took one look at that sad line and the burnt-out people behind the counter. ‘I can’t be unemployed,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m just not cut out for it.’” Just as I had found I wasn’t homeless, Mark had discovered he wasn’t unemployed.

We act like unemployment and homelessness are absolutes, that they’re appropriately descriptive of situations beyond an individual’s control. They aren’t. They’re just words, as formless as any other abstraction. They float harmlessly in the ether until someone screens them onto t-shirts. People see them, and they say, “Hey, that’s me,” or “Hey, that’s Joe.” Emblazoned on a chest, they become labels. Plucked out of the world of ideas and given three dimensions, they wield the power of concrete immutability. They start looking like truth. They start defining personality. They are the emperor’s new clothes, mass produced for all takers. They are the most expensive raiment in the world, even though they’re often proffered with a handout. Their price is freedom, and while you’re busy exchanging it for a mess of pottage, it seems only fair to throw your pride in too.

“It’s easy for you to say,” you may well reply. “You’ve never been truly hungry or truly poor. You’ve got an ivy-covered education and skin as white as snow. What can you possibly know about real lack? My god, you drive around in a truck built for an Arab prince. You’re leading the life the rest of us are scrounging toward and may never achieve. Who the hell are you to talk about the price of freedom?”

“I’m nobody,” says my Emily Dickinson side. “Who are you?”

Who are you, really and truly? People everywhere wear the labels that give them what they need and identify the role they play in the world. They wear “homeless,” and “jobless” and “rich” and “privileged.” They wear “mother” and “brother,” and “cop” and “robber.” But no matter how plastered over in epithets a body becomes, somewhere underneath the shell there’s a winged victory, a free spirit that bears no onus of label, no weight of lack.

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