Jeff Sharlet: Open your eyes. Sunday. Another lucky day. Darkness. A luxury afforded the man who owns two tents, one popped right inside the other. No street light filtering in, no headlights rising along tent walls. Just—dark. You could be anywhere. Your father’s house, before dawn, in Cameroon, or Paris, or Berlin. Or America. Stretch: You want to run, the canyon, your long legs striding, up out of the city until you reach the vista. L.A. You’ll close your eyes and feel the sun on your face, and in your mind a movie will roll, the film of all that is yet to come. You’ve always been gifted like this, granted stories and the power to believe them. Merci, you think. Thank you, God. Blessed with this body. Lean. “Very, very strong,” says your sister, Line, the other half of who you are.
Open your eyes. March 1, 2015. Sunday. You need to call her. Bonne nuit, you texted her last night. Every day you text her. I’ll call tomorrow, my heart, my dear.
Darkness. Silence. Earplugs: You don’t hear the street begin to breathe. The tent people and the blanket people, the single-room-occupancy people coming out for prayer and breakfast at the missions, the stay-awake-all-night dancing-in-place-for-twenty-hours tweaking people, the flat-out face-down sidewalk people. The corner men who piss at the foot of the two-story glass cross on the side of the mission. The cross that brought you to this corner.
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