The mission volunteers made Aria nervous. Most of them were homeless themselves. They simply viewed volunteering as a way to better manipulate their way into getting their own needs met. Many of the women staying there made a quick thirty bucks in the daytime by going to a blood plasma donation center nearby. Aria followed a group of them the first day, but did not go inside. The entire experience at the mission had made her feel like an animal at a slaughterhouse. She squirmed at the thought of giving in to that likeness one step further by willingly letting them drain her blood. The other women kept the money they had made there in the pockets of their clothing. On more than one occasion, Aria witnessed one of the volunteers stealing this money out of the pockets when she took the clothes to the lockers before it was time for the lights to go out. Having your possessions stolen, no matter how few possessions you had, seemed to be part of life on the street.
“Lights out” was not really lights out in the mission. In fact, half of the lights stayed on all night long. Long, fluorescent bulbs that hissed as if cursing the women that lay directly underneath them. Every so often, in a muddled chorus, a child started crying in the middle of the night, and then another and another. Their cries usually subsided, but only so the children could avoid further scolding, not because they were being soothed. Aria had come to the mission thinking that she would sleep better there than she did out in the frigid night air. Being there, however, she realized that sleeplessness was another part of life on the streets that simply had to be accepted. On multiple occasions, she lay in her bottom bunk completely bewildered by the fact that so many women seemed to have no problem whatsoever sleeping in those conditions. Again, this made Aria feel like she did not belong.
In the morning, at about 5.30am, the other lights went on in the large room. A woman shouted for everyone to wake up and then they were ordered not to leave their beds until a volunteer had collected their clothing and handed it to them personally. In exchange, the women turned in the bed sheets they had used for the night, which were placed in an industrial waste bin to be taken to launder.
With clothing in hand, they then formed a line outside the bathroom. The lines in the mission seemed to last forever. Every so often Aria’s attempt to dissociate while standing in them was interrupted by the bark of someone trying to get the women already inside the bathroom to hurry up. Inside the bathroom, there was a row of toilets with no doors, and opposite each toilet, a sink with no mirror above it. Adjacent to this was a room completely covered by stained and aging off-white tiles: the community shower area. The walls were studded with silver nozzles, only one of which worked properly. During her stay there, Aria witnessed more than one tussle over which woman got to use that nozzle. But, as dilapidated as it was, there was hot water. This was what made Aria come back the next night and the next. Aria became conscious that she always took hot water for granted until she had no access to it anymore. The swelter of it whittled down the sharpness of the fear she felt constantly now. As much as her circumstances did not seem to improve from day to day, at least the water could fool her into hoping that they would. Even if it was illusion, she could feel like it might be a fresh new start.
Despite the mandatory showers, the mission smelled rancid. It smelled rancid because people’s clothes were rancid. The women were prohibited from washing them in the sinks. When they had used their ration of soap for bathing, they were handed a towel, which they were made to deposit in a large bin before putting their polluted clothes back on. It was just as well. The industrial soap at the mission smelled like tallow. It made Aria sick to her stomach.
As usual, Aria said next to nothing during her time at the mission. Some of the other women, who, like Aria, stayed for successive nights, began to wonder if she could speak at all. In her silence, Aria simply observed. She listened to conversations to extract advice that the other women were unaware they were even giving. Advice about where to get food and water, places where the police didn’t hassle you during the day, places to go undetected at night, places that gave away things like clothes and toiletries for free, places to get temporary labor jobs for the day, places to loiter and, perhaps most importantly, places to procure street drugs. It took Aria a few minutes of confusion to figure out what they were really talking about, seeing as how none of the women overtly used the word drugs, nor did they use any of the names she had heard commonly used for them. Instead, they spoke of things like Smoke, Bo-Bo, C-Game, Chicken Feed, Base, Brown Sugar, Dirt and Seccy.
If she wanted to stay at the mission, she had to be there by 5pm. Each person trying to get a bed for the night had to fill out the required paperwork about who they were and where they were going. Each night Aria lied on nearly every question. She felt the tension of the potential of getting caught in that lie, but she soon came
