Follow up story to Sweeping the Wind, also by Your friendly neighborhood homeless industrial complex worker
Photos by Sierra Hartman
Part I
On the first day of August in downtown Tacoma, I saw a young woman smoking fentanyl in a crowded church parking lot a few feet away from a narcotics anonymous meeting. She was wearing stained clothes that hung off her thin, brown body. Her eyes looked empty, missing something, devoid of hope. Yet, as she sucked that white smoke into a glass pipe, there was hope all around her. An open church, a roomful of recovering addicts who’d found another day of wellness, a homeless outreach worker offering her a cold water. She was in the right place and had the right problem, seemingly surrounded by possible solutions, a single glass door away from support. But that door only opens one way.
This young woman wasn’t a stranger. I’d known her as a young teen, back when I worked at an inpatient psychiatric facility for kids. A decade ago, she’d been full of life and light and laughed often and fully but also screamed in her sleep and when she woke up for a while thereafter. She’d come from trauma, into state care, into a higher level of state care, and eventually was spit out onto the street. She’d never had a chance…