Chapter Text
I finally got around to getting a new journal after my bag got stolen crossing through the Narrows. Ever since that encounter I’ve steered clear of that piece of Gotham.
It's been about eight months of living on my own on the streets and between the numerous stairwells and underpasses I've slept under, my entire existence feels stuck in limbo. These days I sleep sparingly, and eat only when the gnawing discomfort of hunger becomes unbearable. I've gone to bed hungry too many nights now to keep track. Gotham seems to have a special indifference to your wellbeing. The city around me couldn’t care less if I'm fifteen and hungry. Each night feels like an increasingly hard test to see if I possess enough strength to live to see sunrise.
If I’m being honest, I’m not too sure how much strength is still left in me by now. With each passing day there are lingering whispers working their way deeper into my thoughts, telling me to just give up before I starve to death, or I’m killed by some lowlife. It’s a growing, morbid ideation, and the thought often sits heavy with me as if it’s waiting on me to agree. But I refuse, something deep inside me won’t give up. Perhaps it’s hope, or the thin belief that I have the right to exist, even if it feels like no one else thinks so. Yet I worry that I’m heading towards the same fate set for so many other wayward souls before me in this city.
My thoughts drift to my father, a wayward soul if there ever was one. He’s been gone for years now, so long that I sometimes forget he even existed in my life. He was in and out throughout my childhood, and I can’t say I ever had a strong relationship with him. I remember feeling slightly awkward, and even a little uncomfortable when he was around. He found his untimely end before I had even turned ten. He was just another casualty in a raid on a drug house that didn’t get reported on much. I didn’t really know the true man my father was, and I was never aware of him ever using drugs. My mom would tell me he didn’t, that he somehow got mixed up in whatever had happened but wasn’t involved. Since I never really knew him well, it’s hard to say how I genuinely feel about him.
And my mother was just never the same after we had to bury my dad, she was left a broken widow who soon remarried to her vices. I still remember clearly what she was like when I was a little kid, this paragon of sunshine that I thought could do no wrong. I remember how safe I felt around her, my entire world could be melting down, and her soothing voice would make me believe that it would all be okay. A stark contrast to the person who seems to have taken possession of the woman who I now begrudgingly call my mother.
Once a modest wallflower now warped into a belligerent nuisance over years of abusing booze and pills. I deeply miss the “old” her, and I often wonder what life could have been like had she managed to keep her sanity intact. The possibility that I could still be living in comfort at home, with a mother who loved me unconditionally, leaves me yearning for something that feels impossible.
There had been something about myself I’d been holding close to my chest for a long time, an undeniable fact about who I was. It feels fragile, and it still provokes feelings that feel paralyzing. When I was finally able to work the nerve up to confide in her, to tell her the truth about who I was, and how I had felt all these years, she was repulsed. She screamed about how I was wrong about myself, about how the assertion was disgraceful. She found faults in my arguments, she listed her grievances, she cried and lamented the son she had hoped would mature into a strong young man. I tried for acceptance, but was met with rejection.
From that day forward I was no longer a child, and my relationship with my mother had forever been shattered, what little of it had remained. Her love had long grown to be conditional anyways, this just happened to be the last straw. I stayed for a few more weeks until I couldn’t take anymore of the bitter silence only broken by dehumanizing remarks she spat at me, and worked up the courage to leave. The night I left I didn’t look back, it felt like the culmination of our time together, and I doubt she’s bothered to care that I’m gone.
Ever since then I’ve been living on the streets, barely surviving at times. It feels like I’ve been all over the city by this point. I’ve grown accustomed to sleeping in sketchy places, and have learned to anticipate the unexpected hell that homelessness in Gotham will throw at you. The first few weeks I couldn’t help but jump every time I would hear a siren, like it was some sick reminder of just how dangerous the streets I was now sleeping on were. After a while though I learned to tune them out, and now it’s all become white noise to me. I’ve spent some time asking for money, but I hate doing so, feeling awkward and embarrassed asking strangers for money. So I stopped, and began to just sit back and watch people as they lived, going through my life feeling like a mere spectator at times.
But this actually paid off. I slowly started to see patterns and trends in behavior. I soon took notice of which streets were occupied by local gangs or dealers who stood on the corners. I learned to let the surroundings of the city around me tell me what was happening. You start to guess what the commotion ahead of you is just by the way bystanders react, it can let you know whether it’s some small thing or something far more sinister. After some trial and error I learned what parts of town weren’t safe enough to stay in overnight.
I would credit a combination of this vigilance and sheer dumb luck as the only reasons I'm still breathing. If I’m not stressing myself out about my safety then I find myself worrying about more distant and abstract things. About my identity, and my future in this world. I’ve been doing my best to keep busy, so my thoughts don’t fester into something dangerous. I still continue to draw, often sketching the buildings and environments of the city as I travel through it. I try to do anything to pass the time and keep the dread of the unknown at bay. I’ve even begun to mindlessly practice writing my new chosen name over and over in the back of this journal. A page absolutely filled with “Carrie” written in various styles and sizes, each one a small affirmation, no matter how insignificant it may seem.