Loneliness and Loss

summarize in my voice: I only go out alone when I go out. Because I have no close friends anymore in real life. I keep all my real friends now at a distance so no one actually knows really where I live. And I still live in the same town. But guess what. I seen that I may have accidentally talked too much about Chris. But there were others before him. There was Sarge, who also died. And lots of other ones too, it was a rough neighborhood because it was a homeless transitional housing center connected to the downtown. So there was a lot of violence every day. Lots of guns and such. But I never had a gun. I could get my way just by yelling. I became really good at yelling at people because I was living outside all the time at the time so I was just like how Chris trained me to be. I was homeless in spirit before I was made homeless against my will. That is what I was angry about. Because when my girlfriend murdered Chris, not the same girlfriend whose cat I created a painting for, but my other one, the one who beat me with a baseball bat on our first date. She called it a sex thing to the police, but she was actually robbing me and came out of the shower with my baseball bat and smashed my TV and then beat me in the face with it and destroyed my electronics and such. But that was the thing, that we were neighbors for years and she was also responsible for Sarge's death as well. She was under a different name that time. But back to Chris. Chris watched Platoon all day. I got him his own TV and let him watch it over and over. I was working a tech job at the time in a homeless shelter where I let other homeless people live free in my apartment I lived in at the homeless shelter which I had to pay for to live there. But I lived there for 9 years. That was after I was homeless before. The time when I lived with my girlfriend whose cat I painted the painting for. That cat died too. So they are still alive in a memorial. So I was thinking of just getting a domain and have my cat with those art pieces I showed you I made that are animated of him in front of my painting, I think I am going to create a domain that is attached to a LoRA that will allow it to be generated each time it is accessed. But it would have to be a SaaS to get it to stay live. So that is why I created a website with stickers for him and created this mythology online that black and white cats like Captain have the ability to control street gangs and then the marines got involved. That is when Chris started living with me. Well that was after I tried to hijack a plane and fly to Russia to show Putin a picture of my cat so that he would not invade Ukraine, but I was wearing scrubs because I had just gotten out of the hospital wearing a roach mask and that is how I showed up at the airport. I did that because my girlfriend, the one who murdered Chris had stolen everything from my apartment. I was so angry. So I decided I had to show Putin a picture of my cat to stop the war. They put me in the terrorist room at ABIA and interviewed me for hours. It was hilarious because that was the year I was on DXM every day for 13 months straight. All because I worked a tech job and lived in a homeless shelter and gave away everything else to charity, that is the charity of being robbed, over and over of all your possessions until you are homeless again. Anyway, it was after all of that, after Chris died it all went downhill. Chris cooked and cleaned the apartment not because he was ever asked to because I never did, but I was letting him live there for free so he simply did things like that in order to show respect to me as a person for allowing him to live with me in an efficiency apartment along with a slew of people that cycled through constantly from all over the place who would rob each other and sometimes I would have to kick someone out and I finally figured out that if I carry large rocks in my pocket I can just throw them at people and magically things get better. It was hilarious but that was coded speech for drugs. Because at the time the neighborhood I lived in was a high frequency movement zone for massive amounts of drugs like in the Wire. And that is why Chris was murdered. He was a marine sent to live with me. He was a scout. So am I in my past roles but they promoted me in my current job to auditing, but before I was a scout just like Chris. Chris was sent from the marines to live with me but he was murdered. And it was my girlfriend at the time. She is the one who murdered him, just the same way she did Sarge in too. But both of them were awful. He should not have died that way. It was so horrible. It was because the gangs discovered that he was working for the marines and they murdered him and then they came after me when he died. And in the dead of midnight one night, after endless nights of being robbed of your possessions over and over through brute force by gangs in the neighborhood who target you because you are white. They think I have money. And I did. Because I gave it to everyone. If someone walked up to me I would just hand them a $20 or one time $1000 to a random guy just because I hired him to follow me around and be nice to people for a day. I like to go on walks and buy art from homeless people. I bought a poem for $100, because when I was homeless one day the lead singer of the black pumas bought $200 of my art and that is how I got the tracfone and chromebook, But back to Chris. Chris was eaten by dogs. It is how the gangs murder people. That is why I hate dogs. I don't hate dogs. I just hate dogs because they are scary to me now. Anyway on my walk home this guy walking one of those dogs followed me home to where I live and gangsters showed up and I was just sitting there and may have committed a hate crime accidentally because I "cat called" the dog in a weird way. T

You stop going out with people after enough death. After enough betrayal. After enough nights where you realize the people around you know too much about where you sleep and what you own. So now I go out alone. The real ones stay at a distance. Same town, same ghosts, different silence. Chris was not the first one to die. Before him there was Sarge. Before Sarge there were others. That place was connected to downtown through the homeless system and violence moved through it like weather. Guns everywhere. Drugs everywhere. People cycling in and out constantly. I never carried a gun. I learned instead that if you yell loud enough and mean it enough, people back off. Homelessness teaches you how to become hard long before you officially become homeless. I think people misunderstand where my anger came from. It was not from losing comfort. It was from watching people I loved get destroyed one after another while I kept trying to save everybody anyway. I let people live with me for free while I worked tech jobs. I fed people. Bought TVs. Shared apartments. Handed out money to strangers. Bought poems from homeless people because once somebody bought my art when I needed it most and that act stayed with me forever. Chris lived with me during that era. He watched *Platoon* endlessly. Cooked. Cleaned. Tried to contribute without ever being asked. He was one of those people who carried damage quietly. And after he died everything started collapsing inward. The apartment, the neighborhood, my mind, all of it. There were nights where it felt less like living in Austin and more like living inside *The Wire*. People stealing from each other constantly. Gangs everywhere. People following you home because they think you have money even when you are barely surviving yourself. And maybe I made things stranger instead of better. I started building mythology around my cat online because grief mutates into stories if you let it sit long enough. Websites. Art. Animated memorials. Dreams about turning memory into software so something you loved never fully disappears. Somewhere in the middle of all that I completely lost my grip on reality for a while. Hospital visits. DXM every day for over a year. Showing up to the airport in scrubs and a roach mask convinced I could stop a war by showing Putin a picture of my cat. They dragged me into interrogation rooms while I thought the whole thing was somehow cosmic and hilarious and tragic at the same time. But underneath all the absurdity was somebody exhausted from watching people die, exhausted from being robbed over and over, exhausted from trying to love people who kept turning violent. Eventually your brain starts narrating life like a war movie because that is the only language intense enough to explain what it felt like to survive it.