Surviving The Fire, 3

Finding my way through life on my own began effectively when I was eighteen.  I moved back to Vancouver that summer where I stayed in a ramshackle house full of losers.  I was by far the youngest.  The place reeked of cat shit and baby piss, and the baby belonged to the dysfunctional couple running the place.  We were by the railroad tracks and every night the midnight train would serenade us while simulating a six magnitude earthquake.  I wandered in and out of the lives and homes and soap operas of a plethora of beautiful losers, a dry sponge absorbing life and experience.  I quit my first job and struggled with poverty but kept my small apartment, and returned for a while to experimenting with drugs, notably acid, and moved to Toronto a year later for six months where my life continued to take on the ambience and intensity of an experimental film.  It was living in a three-dimensional painting by Salvador Dali.  I also became a very able vegetarian cook and really began to learn how and what to read, discovering simultaneously Virginia Woolf and Herman Hesse.

Seeing no future in Toronto I returned to Vancouver and having rediscovered my Christian faith, returned also to my church where I discovered that I was going in one direction and everyone else in another.  They had all become boring, neo-fascist rightwing stuffed shirts, or so it seemed.  I got kicked out of the house I was living in under the church's authority for being just a little too beautiful for their comfort level.  Finding and keeping decent employment was an ongoing struggle.  Employers didn`t seem to know where to fit me or what to do with me.  Needless to say, I wasn`t doing at all well financially but still did okay and managed to surround and fill my life with beauty.  My church split in two due to various scandals and theological conundrums.  I left both entities the church had split into but remained in contact for a few years with other survivors and we met together regularly to pray, worship, sing and support and uphold one another.  The Holy Spirit was very strong among us and the sense of the beauty of God`s loving, merciful and reconciling presence was often very strong and very intense.

At twenty-two I lived in a very oppressive Christian community while attending community college.  It all ended badly.  I was kicked out, onto the street but for my mother being available to take me in to her home that same night, I otherwise would have been sleeping on the street.  (It was winter.)  My crime?  I suspect it might have been unrequited love.  The leader of the community appeared to be a closeted bisexual with a strong affection for me.  I never really reciprocated and eventually became cool and withdrawn from him, also out of respect for his wife.

Still, I was traumatized.