Home again, home again.

A lot of you don't know this about me, but I was homeless as a kid. 

I lived a long time in those transitional stages that come before real homelessness hits: the house with no power, the uninsulated garage or storage room. The couch in someone's living room. The spare room that somebody let me for a night or a week or a year. 

That's not an easy way to live, but the real thing is nothing like that. There is a world of difference between a couch to crash on and your first night in an olive grove, shivering and staring up at the stars. The fundamental lack of protection and safety strips the myelin sheath off of every nerve and you never really relax. You never really let go. You don't sleep deeply and you keep an endless vigil, waiting for sleep to take you unawares. You can't just surrender to it. I couldn't, anyway. 

Those couches and spare rooms allowed for short periods of privacy, a moment's relief from the animal terror of exposure. I owe a dozen friends and lost acquaintances a series of debts I can't ever repay, because they took pity enough to let me in. I did chores and watched kids, I pitched in and cooked and tried to stay out of the way. I was a teenager and an asshole and I didn't always do this right. I was abandoned and hurt and didn't yet know how to claim and contain those feelings. 

What I want to tell you is that these people saved me. One night at a time, one kindness, large or small, one dinner they invited me to or room where they let me sleep, each of them was another time I didn't die or fall into a deeper crack in the world from which there was no escape. 

This week, I wrote about a program starting here in San Francisco to connect homeless LGBTQ kids to hosts who will do this same work. It provides a framework for something queer people and allies have been doing a long time; taking in kids who get kicked out and have no place else to go. The truth about those couches and garages is that not all of them were safe places to be. Not everyone who takes in a 17-year-old girl off the streets has the best of intentions. The host home program is meant to provide some structure for a very noble gesture so that they stay noble. 

I owe the world a kid taken off the street. I probably owe several. And this city could really use that kind of help; there are roughly 500 kids on the street every night in San Francisco alone. But this is the only place I have ever lived in my life where a person making six figures in a year cannot afford to live well. And the structure of this program insists that a host be able to offer a kid private space; nobility upon nobility. I can't be that person here. I know very few people who can. 

If there is any chance that someone reading this letter can do this good and noble thing, come talk to me. I have spoken to people organizing at the local and national level. There are chapters in other cities, if you're not in the Bay. I know everything you need to know, and I can tell you what it meant to me. I can't tell you that it'll be fun or easy, or that nothing will disappear from your house. But I can tell you that without someone taking this risk, I wouldn't be here. 

And I'm here so I can do stuff like read you my story from Wastelands 3 at Borderlands on the 3rd at 3 o'clock with Charlie Jane Anders and Richard Kadrey. I'm glad I'm here for that, and I hope you can be, too. 

I'm here so I can keep helping to bring Cliterary Salon into the world, showing you where hot girl summer becomes Sad Boy Fall. 

I'm here so that I can love people and make good art and enjoy my flesh prison and take long walks in the cemetery and make stupid jokes and smell the ocean every day and write books and write letters and write plays and write and write and write. 

I know why I'm here. I fought hard to stay. 

I hope you know the same. I hope you've had to fight less than I have. I hope that you can help someone else make it through, in small ways or in large. If you don't know why you're here, helping someone is the best place I know to start figuring that out. 

Living on purpose, 

Meg