It is one o’clock in the morning and all is quiet.

The only sound is the grossly oversized window unit air conditioner wedged into an opening roughly cut haphazardly into the side of the office wall. It drones. Annoyingly.

The man with his feet on the desk works at the hotel overnight full-time as its sole engineer for that shift. The hours are steady, the room calls are infrequent and typically of no real importance.

The man with his feet on the desk is me. All I have written lately are incident reports for incidents I didn’t create, yet solved.

My life is lonely. My days are solitary. Nearly as much as when I was struggling to survive on the streets. My sole friend lives a thousand miles away.

I dwell precariously in an arrangement that I recently discovered was illegal. Namely,
ten men in a two-bedroom apartment. It is truly awful. It is akin to a cockroach-infested homeless shelter, except in this case I have the displeasure of paying rent to a man who is making nearly twenty thousand a month on the whole building.

It is an imbalanced arrangement rife with greed under the guise of altruism.

I recently purchased a motorcycle, a Triumph Bonneville America, for a mere two hundred and fifty dollars. It needs work. However, transportation is vital to escaping the poor living conditions.

My life is slowly becoming tolerable. Yet a fear of the streets dwells in the back of my mind. It sits back there, mocking me. As if the stain of sleeping on concrete was some scarlet letter.

Even being gainfully employed and making small yet vital steps seems futile. I can oddly see the reasoning of those hardcore, lifelong homeless men who have given up on our society and watch from the fringe. Unanswered questions—What am I doing? Where am I going?—loom in the distance of my mind.

My job and housing stability do not provide any answers.

I wait for redemption.