Homeless in a Pandemic

Zombie apocalypse??? We no longer must wait for that event to begin. We merely have to open our eyes and look around. The zombie apocalypse is happening now, but no one see it except us, the meth-heads, tweakers, night people, whatever you want to call us the zombies we are.

We are unlike the ones you see in the movies who run around attacking innocent people just to brutally kill them to eat their brains. We aren’t set out wanting to eat brains, I can assure we don’t want to, nor will we have a need to eat brains. Also, we have no desire to harm anyone, except of course ourselves and other that are like us.

Now, I had never really ventured out into the city in the middle of the night before, but this night I went for a walk with my son. Odd as it may seem to an outsider, I was trying to connect with my son and really know who he is and why he does the things he does.

As he and I walked we found ourselves at a park in the middle of downtown. Not entirely unusual, however, what I saw was. One would think that a park in the middle of downtown at 3 am would be completely vacant. The norm tells us that logically no one should be there because people are asleep at 3 am. But to me it looked as though I was watching a scene from “The Walking Dead” (one of my favorite shows of course). There were people were scattered throughout the park just standing there in the dark, motionless. But as I looked closer I noticed that they are not completely motionless, they are swaying back and forth from side to side, just like zombies on the show. And yet others were rooting around looking on the ground for who knows what, my son included. I asked him what he was looking for and he simply stated, not even stopping to comment, that he/they were constantly in search of any amount of K2 that they could scrounge off the ground. That specific act he continued for much of the evening.

As, I began to make my way through the park, no longer standing and staring at what I saw I noticed more people huddled together in small groups here and there whispering to one another in voices just low enough that a passerby could hear but not really make out exactly what they were saying. All that said the most unusual part was, I was not afraid of what I was witnessing. not even a little bit. Confused? Most definitely but not afraid. Quite possibly because I myself am a zombie, tweaker, scum of the earth. More than likely that is true, however, I am not now, nor will I EVER be like one of these people I was looking at.

I have no idea exactly how one turns into a zombie. How one day you can be just a “normal” person dealing with the crap that life hands you on a daily and then “POOF” the next day you’re wandering around talking to lamp posts and having arguments with people that aren’t there or standing in the middle of a park in the middle of the night?

How much dope does it really take?

How much does a person have to go through?

How much pain does it take to make you want to do so much dope that you literally turn yourself into a zombie?

Or how little dope?

Better still, how does a community just ignore these people on a daily. We have all seen them doing the weird things that I just spoke of, seeing but not really looking. “Normal” people going on about their day, walking past that poor girl who is clearly having some sort of breakdown and they just continue to walk by, probably thinking to themselves, “Crazy is out early today.”

I myself am guilty of that same thing. I used to be “normal” …. I used to have the luxury of just ignoring those things. But that was before, in a time that seems so long ago....back in a time when I was not a ZOMBIE.

Now, as I stated I have not always been a zombie. I had a very normal life outside of the usual bullshit we are handed. Being a divorced single mom of 3 and having to be everything to everyone always. Seems like it would be an impossible feat to accomplish and on some days it was. Especially when the kids decided I no longer mattered and I had no voice to them except of course that strange Charlie Brown’s mom voice, lots of sound, but not making any logical sense to the kids. But I suppose that is my punishment for getting divorced from their dad and he moves back east never to be seen again except for 2 times while they were growing up. I was left to clean up the mess.

Being the strong stubborn person that I am I did not just roll over and allow the kids to walk over me, even though that is what it probably looked like from the outside. But that is only because I was good at pretending and not allowing the struggles we were having to flow outside the walls of our home. One of biggest rules was … what happens at home stays at home.