Boston died with fentanyl and cocaine in his body.

He did not die because nobody had made drugs illegal.

They were already illegal.

They had been illegal his entire life.

That didn’t stop him from finding them.

It didn’t stop me from finding them.

It didn’t stop the dealers, the money, the crack pipes, the sleepless nights, the paranoia, or the endless pursuit of something that was never going to be enough.

And on January 13, 2024, it didn’t stop my brother from dying.

So I have a question.

What exactly did prohibition protect Boston from?

Read more

For International Overdose Awareness Day

I overdosed before my brother did.

But that’s another story.

I lived.

Boston didn’t.

There are days when those three sentences still feel impossible to put beside each other.

My overdose happened on the fifth floor of the Halifax Central Library.

I swallowed somewhere between seventy and a hundred pills.

I wanted to die.

There is no softer way to write that.

Then there is a blank.

Five weeks of my life disappeared into a coma.

Almost four months disappeared into a hospital.

Six more weeks went to The Bridge. A Hotel-Shelter-Trap House.

You can find everything at 99 Wyse Road.

I had to come back to a life I had decided, at least for one moment, that I could no longer carry.

And then, only weeks after I came home from the hospital, my brother died of an overdose.

January 13, 2024.

Boston didn’t get five weeks in a coma.

He didn’t wake up confused.

He didn’t get months in a hospital bed.

He didn’t get another morning.

There is another truth that makes all of this harder to understand.

I wanted to die.

Boston didn’t.

Mine was intentional.

His was an accident.

I swallowed those pills knowing what I hoped would happen.

Boston smoked crack expecting to wake up again.

I survived.

He didn’t.

I have spent a lot of time trying to make sense of that.

There is no sense to make of it.

Boston was found more than twelve hours after he died, a blue Bic lighter in one hand and a crack pipe in the other.

Fentanyl was in his toxicology.

So was cocaine.

And suddenly I was standing on the living side of something that had almost taken me too.

That does something to you.

People talk about overdose in numbers.

Deaths.

Emergency calls.

Naloxone kits.

Toxic drug supply.

Statistics.

And those things matter.

But an overdose is never a number to the people who love the person attached to it.

It is a phone that will never ring again.

A chair nobody sits in.

A birthday that keeps arriving for someone who doesn’t.

It is reading a fourteen-page death report because fourteen pages are somehow supposed to explain how an entire human being disappeared.

It is learning the concentration of fentanyl in your brother’s blood when what you really want to know is whether he was scared.

Whether he knew.

Whether it hurt.

Whether somebody could have saved him.

Those answers weren’t in the report.

I know something about overdose because I have stood on both sides of it.

I know what it is to be the person everyone almost lost.

And I know what it is to be the person left behind.

That makes August 31 complicated for me.

Because I don’t want to turn my brother into a cautionary tale.

And I don’t want to turn my survival into an inspirational one.

Neither would be true.

Boston was an addict.

So was I.

We were also a brother and a sister.

We were funny.

We were fucked up.

We loved each other.

We enabled each other.

We frightened each other.

We survived things together that probably should have separated us long before death finally did.

Addiction wasn’t everything we were.

But eventually it became big enough to decide which one of us got another morning.

I did.

He didn’t.

There is no clean lesson in that.

I cannot tell you that I survived because I was stronger.

I cannot tell you Boston died because he didn’t want recovery badly enough.

I cannot tell you that love should have saved him.

God knows there was enough of it.

What I can tell you is that somewhere tonight, somebody is using drugs who doesn’t look like the person you picture when you hear the word addict.

Somebody’s brother.

Somebody’s daughter.

Somebody’s mother.

Somebody’s best friend.

And somewhere else, someone is sitting beside a hospital bed begging a person to wake up.

Someone is administering naloxone.

Someone is answering a telephone.

Someone is identifying a body.

Someone is getting another chance.

And someone isn’t.

So on International Overdose Awareness Day, I won’t ask you to remember a statistic.

Remember a person.

Say their name.

Tell the ugly parts of their story if those parts matter, but tell the beautiful ones too.

Don’t make them saints because they’re dead.

And don’t make them disposable because they were addicted.

Boston was here.

He mattered when he was using.

He mattered when he was impossible.

He mattered when he was sick.

He mattered before he became a toxicology report.

And he matters now.

I wanted to die, and I lived.

My brother wanted to live, and he overdosed.

Neither of us got the outcome we expected.

I survived my overdose.

My brother didn’t survive his.

I will spend the rest of my life living inside the distance between those two sentences.

His name was Boston.

January 13, 2024.

“That book the girl from high school wrote.”

“I feel sorry for her.”

“He overdosed. Everyone knew it would happen.”

“Why didn’t she just leave?”

“She made some pretty bad choices too.”

You know the sentences.

You don’t know the story.

The addiction.
The violence.
The homelessness.
The overdose.
The choices nobody understands from the outside.

You’re seeing the result, not the sequence.

I wrote the sequence.

CRACKED FOUNDATIONS

$6/month.

Come read what happened between the sentences.

substack.com/@crackedfoundations

An interlude on imperfect victims, messy survival, and why compassion so often arrives too late.

I’ve been sitting with that sentence.

Especially after telling you about my eye.

Because we seem to have an extraordinary capacity for compassion once a woman is gone.

Once the story has an ending.

Once there is nothing left to question, criticize, diagnose or dismiss.

Then we look backward.

We reread what she said.

We examine the photographs.

We remember the relationships.

We recognize the addiction.

The depression.

The fear.

The bruises.

The erratic behaviour.

The cries for help that didn’t look enough like cries for help at the time.

And suddenly everybody can see it.

She was struggling.

But where was that compassion while she was still here?

While she was living through it, she may have been called dramatic.

Crazy.

Difficult.

Unstable.

Attention-seeking.

Messy.

An addict.

A bad mother.

A woman who kept making terrible choices.

A victim who went back.

A woman who should have known better.

Then tragedy happens, and somehow the language changes.

Now she was troubled.

Now she was traumatized.

Now people wonder why nobody helped her.

Why are we so much better at recognizing a woman’s pain in hindsight?

I think about that question differently now.

Because I wasn’t the kind of victim people are most comfortable believing.

I didn’t always cower.

I didn’t always stay quiet.

Sometimes I screamed back.

Sometimes I fought back.

Sometimes I was furious.

Sometimes I made choices that probably made absolutely no sense to anyone standing safely outside my life.

And yes.

Sometimes I went back.

None of that changed what happened to me.

Sometimes she screams back.

Sometimes she fights back.

Sometimes she bites the hand that is hurting her.

Sometimes she uses drugs.

Sometimes she returns to him.

Sometimes she protects him.

Sometimes she lies about what happened.

Sometimes she tells the truth and takes it back.

Sometimes she asks for help and refuses it when it arrives.

And sometimes people use all of those things as evidence that she couldn’t really have been a victim.

We like victims better when they’re uncomplicated.

Quiet.

Grateful.

Sober.

Cooperative.

When they leave the first time.

When they never answer his phone call again.

When they follow every safety plan.

When they make choices we understand.

When their behaviour doesn’t make us uncomfortable.

But trauma doesn’t work like that.

Neither does addiction.

Neither does abuse.

And neither do human beings.

Believing women doesn’t mean believing women are perfect.

It doesn’t mean women never lie, hurt people, make terrible decisions or need to be held accountable.

It means understanding that someone’s pain deserves to be taken seriously before she becomes a tragedy.

Mental illness isn’t always pretty.

Trauma isn’t always quiet.

Addiction isn’t always sympathetic.

And abuse does not always create the perfect victim.

Sometimes pain looks messy as hell.

I know mine did.

There were times I couldn’t explain my own decisions, so expecting everyone else to understand them would have been impossible.

Why did I stay?

Why did I go back?

Why did I fight?

Why didn’t I call the police sooner?

Why did I still love someone who hurt me?

Why did losing an eye not automatically make me walk away forever?

Those questions make sense from the outside.

From inside an abusive relationship, things don’t happen in clean chronological order.

Love doesn’t disappear the moment violence appears.

Fear can exist beside loyalty.

Anger can exist beside love.

Hope can survive evidence that should have killed it.

And leaving can happen many times before it finally becomes leaving.

That doesn’t make someone stupid.

It makes the story more complicated than the version of victimhood we’ve been taught to recognize.

Maybe one of the most damaging things we do is look at a woman standing in the wreckage of her own life and ask:

What’s wrong with her?

When perhaps the better question is:

What happened to her?

Those are two very different questions.

One looks for a character flaw.

The other looks for a story.

And there is almost always a story.

We shouldn’t need an obituary before we’re willing to hear it.

We shouldn’t need a documentary ten years later.

We shouldn’t need photographs.

Court records.

Hospital records.

Toxicology reports.

Police reports.

Or somebody standing at a funeral saying they wish they’d known how bad things were.

Sometimes she already told us.

I’m struggling.

Something isn’t right.

I’m scared.

I need help.

Maybe she didn’t say it beautifully.

Maybe she didn’t say it calmly.

Maybe she said it while high.

Maybe she screamed it.

Maybe she said it with blood running down her face.

Maybe she said it and then went straight back to the person who hurt her.

Maybe she asked for help one night and defended him the next morning.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the pain wasn’t real.

It means human suffering rarely arrives packaged neatly enough for everybody else to approve of it.

I survived.

That gives me the privilege of being able to explain some of this myself.

Not every woman gets that opportunity.

And I don’t want compassion for women like me to arrive only when we’re finally easy to mourn.

I want it while we’re difficult to understand.

While we’re still making mistakes.

While we’re angry.

While we’re using.

While we’re going back.

While we’re trying to leave.

While we’re telling the truth badly.

While we’re still here.

Because there is something terribly wrong with a world that understands a woman’s suffering better once she can no longer speak for herself.

So stop waiting until women become ghosts to believe they were haunted.

Listen while she’s still standing in front of you.

Complicated.

Imperfect.

Alive.

While there’s still time. 

I bit his finger so hard I could taste his blood before I felt my own dripping down my face.

I lost my right eye to a man I loved.

Not in a car accident.
Not to cancer.
Not in war.

To rage.

It was just after four in the morning.

F60.81 and I were camping in August. The campground was still mostly asleep. Somewhere in the distance, a generator hummed. Someone coughed from another campsite. A zipper opened and closed.

The sky had that strange predawn colour where the world hasn’t quite decided whether it is still night or already morning.

F60.81 stepped outside to take a piss.

When he came back, something had changed.

I knew before he said anything.

His face was tight. His movements were sharp. He carried anger back into the tent with him.

I wasn’t in a particularly good mood either.

That matters to me when I tell this story.

There is a version of domestic violence people are more comfortable with. The victim cowers. She stays quiet. She never yells back. Never gets angry. Never fights.

I wasn’t always that victim.

Sometimes I yelled back.

Sometimes I fought back.

That morning, I would bite him hard enough to taste his blood.

None of that made what happened next something I caused.

Normally, we had a routine. A bong toke or two, a cigarette, then back into our sleeping bags until the alarm went off or the rising sun turned the tent into an oven.

Not this morning.

I recognized the signs.

Leave.

Give him space.

Twenty minutes, maybe.

Maybe he would cool off.

Maybe he would fall asleep.

Maybe we would wake up later and pretend none of it had happened.

That had become our normal.

I stood.

Maybe I brushed against him.

Maybe I said I was going to the washroom.

I don’t remember.

Whatever it was, it was enough.

He shoved me.

Hard.

I went backward and hit the ground.

I scrambled across the end of the air mattress, trying to put distance between us.

But there is nowhere to go inside a tent.

Nylon walls.
Sleeping bags.
An air mattress.
Him.
Me.

And one zipper out.

He picked up the bong.

For a fraction of a second, I thought he was going to smoke it.

Instead, he smashed it against the side of my head, then tipped the water over me.

Dirty bong water poured through my hair.

It ran down my forehead, into my face, underneath my hoodie and along my neck.

Sour.
Stale.
Filthy.

Even now, after everything that happened next, I remember the smell.

I screamed.

I lunged for the zipper, tore open the tent and stumbled into the cold August air.

Three steps.

Maybe less.

He was already behind me.

“Shut the fuck up.”

His hand closed around my arm.

Then he hit me. Closed fist, with a lighter in his hand.

The sound travelled through the campground.

A man’s voice came out of the darkness.

“Hey buddy! What’s going on over there?”

Someone heard me.

For one second, I thought that meant I was safe.

F60.81 threw me to the ground.

His hand crushed over my mouth.

I tried to scream against his palm.

Nothing came out.

I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t call for help.

So I fought.

I bit him.

I sank my teeth into one of his fingers as hard as I could.

Hard enough to taste his blood.

He ripped his hand away.

Lights started coming on.

One RV.

Then another.

A door opened.

Voices.

People were waking up.

And then F60.81 said the sentence I had heard before.

“Fuck. Fuck. I’m going to jail.”

Not:

Are you okay?

Not:

What have I done?

I’m going to jail.

He dragged me toward the car.

I don’t remember getting there.

I remember the driver’s seat.

I remember blood.

A lot of blood.

Then I remember his face changing.

The rage disappeared.

He stared at me.

“Oh my God.”

I looked at him.

“Your eye.”

His voice cracked.

“I’m so sorry.”

Then the question.

“Why do I keep doing this?”

I had heard that before too.

I reached for the rear-view mirror.

Tilted it toward me.

And looked.

For a moment, my brain refused to understand the reflection.

Blood covered the right side of my face.

And my eye?

My eye wasn’t where an eye was supposed to be.

I stared.

There are moments when the body understands something before the mind allows it to.

This was one of them.

The adrenaline began to disappear.

Pain rushed in behind it.

I wasn’t thinking about leaving him.

I wasn’t thinking about police.

Court.

Prison.

Domestic violence.

I wasn’t even thinking about tomorrow.

I was trying to survive the next five minutes.

We hadn’t gone far when blue and red lights appeared far behind us.

They weren’t coming after us.

They were heading toward the campground we had just left.

Someone had called the police.

F60.81 saw them too.

“Stop!”

I pulled over.

He opened the passenger door.

And ran.

He disappeared into the darkness.

The police continued toward the campground.

I stayed behind the wheel.

Blood running down my face.

One eye staring after him.

I didn’t have a choice.

~

The hospital was barely a mile away.

Read more

I wish I could tell you that after twenty-two days in the woods being more afraid of the man beside me than the bears beyond the tent, I left.

I didn’t.

I stayed for almost two more years before I lost my eye.

That sentence probably makes more sense from the outside than those two years ever made from inside them.

People like clean timelines.

The first time he scares you, you leave.

The first time he threatens you, you leave.

The first time he puts his hands on you, you definitely leave.

That is how I once thought it worked too.

But there wasn’t a morning when I woke up and thought, Today I am going to become a woman who stays in an abusive relationship.

There were just mornings.

Coffee.

Groceries.

Laundry.

Plans for dinner.

Apologies.

Promises.

Good days.

Really good days.

And then another bad night.

That was the part I didn’t understand yet.

Abuse didn’t arrive and announce itself.

It moved in slowly.

It unpacked one box at a time.

By the time I realized it was living with us, most of my own things had already been moved out of the way.

My boundaries.

My confidence.

My independence.

My ability to trust what I was seeing.

Especially that.

Because F60.71 could make me question something I had watched happen directly in front of me.

He could explode and hours later behave as though nothing unusual had occurred.

Sometimes he apologized.

Sometimes I apologized.

Eventually, I stopped being entirely sure which one of us was supposed to.

And then there were the good days.

That is the part people don’t talk about enough.

If every day had been terrible, leaving might have been easier.

But they weren’t.

Some days he was funny.

Some days he was affectionate.

Some days we laughed until my stomach hurt.

We made plans.

We talked about places we would go.

There were mornings when I looked at him and saw exactly the man I believed I had fallen in love with.

Those days became evidence too.

Evidence I used against myself.

See?

He’s not always like that.

See?

We can be happy.

See?

Maybe last night really did get out of hand.

So I learned to live between versions of him.

The loving one.

The angry one.

The wounded one.

The suspicious one.

The one who needed me.

The one I was beginning to fear.

And somewhere along the way, I became different versions of myself too.

The one who knew when to speak.

The one who knew when to shut up.

The one who could tell from the way a door closed what kind of evening we were going to have.

The one who could redirect a conversation before it became an argument.

The one who could apologize without knowing what she had done.

The one who could pretend she wasn’t afraid.

I became very fucking good at it.

Good enough that sometimes I fooled myself.

There were incidents during those two years.

Of course there were.

I could list them.

I could reconstruct every argument and every threat. I could tell you which rooms we were standing in, what time of day it was, what he said and what I said back.

I could build a case.

But this isn’t a courtroom.

And the truth of those two years isn’t contained in one incident.

It is contained in what happened between them.

The shrinking.

The adjusting.

The constant recalculation.

The way my world slowly reorganized itself around another person’s moods.

I stopped asking myself what I wanted and started asking what would keep things calm.

Those are not the same question.

I didn’t recognize that then.

I thought I was being understanding.

Patient.

Loyal.

I thought relationships were difficult and people were complicated and everyone carried damage from somewhere.

He certainly did.

And I became very skilled at using his pain to explain mine.

He had been hurt.

He had been failed.

He had been angry long before he met me.

There was always an explanation.

And explanations are dangerous things when you start confusing them with excuses.

So I stayed.

Not because I enjoyed being afraid.

Not because I didn’t know something was wrong.

And certainly not because I was weak.

I stayed because the person frightening me was also the person telling me he loved me.

Because the bad moments were followed by tenderness.

Because every escalation moved the line a little farther, and once I adjusted to the new line, it became normal.

Until the next one moved it again.

That is how two years disappear.

Not in one dramatic decision.

In inches.

You surrender a little peace.

Then a little independence.

Then a little dignity.

Then something happens that would once have been unimaginable and you find yourself explaining why it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked.

Eventually, survival becomes a routine so ordinary you stop calling it survival.

You call it Tuesday.

Looking back, I want to reach into those two years and grab that woman by the shoulders.

I want to tell her that the fear she felt on the Cabot Trail counted.

That she did not need bruises to prove anything.

That instinct was evidence. 

That love was not supposed to require strategy.

But she wouldn’t have listened.

I know that because people tried.

And because she still believed there was a version of this story where F60.71 got better and everything we had survived became proof of how strong our relationship was.

She didn’t understand yet that surviving someone isn’t the same thing as building a life with them.

She would understand eventually.

There are hundreds of moments I could use to explain those two years.

I don’t need hundreds.

I only need to tell you where they eventually led.

A campsite.

An ambulance.

An operating room.

And the last day I would ever see the world with both eyes.

There was no bear.

I should probably make that clear before anyone imagines me standing somewhere along the Cabot Trail, face-to-face with a six-hundred-pound black bear while F60.71 heroically defended me with a camping spoon.

That never happened.

The bear came years later.

Not an actual bear.

A question.

If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a man or a bear?

The internet did what the internet does.

Men were offended.

Women chose the bear.

Men explained why women were wrong.

They posted statistics. Survival advice. Videos of bear attacks. Detailed descriptions of what a bear could do to the human body.

Apparently, women had failed to properly consider the bear.

I had.

I had twenty-two days to consider the bear.

I had slept in a tent in the forests of Cape Breton with nothing between me and whatever was moving outside except a few millimetres of nylon and a zipper.

I knew there were bears out there.

I thought about them at night.

Every snapped branch sounded larger in the dark. Every rustle became something with teeth. I knew enough to understand that we were visitors in their territory and that if one wandered into our campsite, I had very little control over what happened next.

But the strange thing was, the possibility of a bear never frightened me as much as the man sleeping beside me.

Because the bear did not love me.

The bear had never promised me anything.

It wasn’t going to wake up affectionate after terrifying me the night before.

It wasn’t going to tell me I had misunderstood what happened.

It wasn’t going to convince me that its anger was caused by something I had said.

A bear would simply be a bear.

There was something almost comforting about that.

Predictable danger.

By then, I had already started learning how to read F60.71.

Not consciously.

I wasn’t calling it abuse.

I wasn’t even calling it fear.

I was just becoming very good at noticing things.

The way his jaw tightened.

The change in his voice.

How hard he put something down.

The silence that meant something different from ordinary silence.

I learned when to stop talking.

When to apologize.

When to make myself smaller.

When humour might work.

When touching him might calm him.

When touching him would make things worse.

I learned to monitor another human being with the attention most people reserve for weather warnings.

And still, I told myself everything was fine.

There were no bruises.

That mattered to me then.

I thought violence was something you could photograph.

A swollen eye.

A split lip.

A hole punched through drywall.

I didn’t understand that sometimes violence begins long before anybody raises a hand.

Sometimes it begins when one person becomes responsible for managing another person’s emotions in order to remain safe.

Sometimes your body understands that before you do.

Mine did.

That is what I remember most about the Cabot Trail now.

Not the mountains.

Not the ocean.

Not even the exhaustion of carrying my life on my back for twenty-two days.

I remember my body knowing.

Lying completely still beside him.

Listening.

Waiting for his breathing to change.

Trying to determine which version of the man I loved was lying inches away from me.

And outside the tent were animals.

Wild ones.

The supposedly dangerous ones.

Years later, women were asked to choose.

Man or bear?

And millions of us answered almost immediately.

The bear.

The outrage that followed was almost more revealing than the question.

Because the question was never really about bears.

Women weren’t claiming bears were harmless.

We know bears can kill us.

That is precisely why the answer matters.

With the bear, the danger is understood.

Nobody asks what you were wearing when the bear attacked you.

Nobody wonders whether you led the bear on.

Nobody asks why you went into the forest if you knew bears lived there.

Nobody tells you the bear was probably stressed.

Or drinking.

Or had a difficult childhood.

Nobody asks what you said immediately before the bear mauled you.

Nobody suggests there are two sides to the mauling.

And nobody asks why you didn’t leave the forest sooner.

The bear doesn’t need you to prove that you were afraid.

That part stayed with me.

Because eventually there would be bruises.

There would be police.

There would be shelters.

There would be injuries I could no longer explain away.

There would come a day when fear was no longer an instinct whispering in the darkness.

It would become evidence.

But on the Cabot Trail, none of that had happened yet.

There was only a woman lying awake in a tent beside a man she loved, listening to something moving beyond the trees.

Back then, if someone had asked me which frightened me more, I probably would have laughed.

I might even have defended him.

I was still protecting the man I would eventually need protection from.

But my body already knew the answer.

It had known for twenty-two days.

The bear was somewhere outside the tent.

The danger was sleeping beside me.

We backpacked the Cabot Trail in May, before the tourists arrived and before the island fully woke up for the season.

Most places were still closed.
Gift shops dark.
Campgrounds half-open.
Roads quiet enough that you could hear the ocean long before you could see it.

For twenty-two days, we carried everything on our backs.

When exhaustion finally took over each night, we would pitch the tent wherever we could find space. Near tree lines. Hidden patches of field. Off trails just enough to avoid attention.

Some nights were beautiful in the way only complete isolation can be. Ocean air pushing through the tent walls. Silence so deep it almost felt holy.

Other nights, I lay awake beside him feeling safer hearing movement in the woods than hearing the change in his breathing.

That was the first time I remember understanding fear could exist without violence.

No black eye yet.
No broken furniture.
No shelters.
No police.

Just instinct.

The kind that quietly whispers something is wrong long before your mind is willing to admit it.

Fuckface’s moods could change without warning. A wrong tone. A delay answering. Me being too tired. Too emotional. Too quiet. Too independent.

Sometimes I never understood what triggered it at all. The air would simply shift and suddenly I was spending the next several hours trying to guide us safely back toward peace.

Then morning would come and he would become soft again. Loving. Attentive. Talking about our future like the night before never happened.

And because there were no bruises yet, I convinced myself the fear did not count.

But some of those nights, deep in the forests along the Cabot Trail, with bears somewhere beyond the trees and no one for miles around, I would have chosen the bear over Fuckface without hesitation.

I just was not ready to say that out loud yet.
:::

Maybe because too many people understand exactly what it means.

A victim can survive the violence, report it, testify, cooperate with the system, watch a conviction happen—

and still be the person left figuring out how to stay safe when it is all over.

But that card is only a few sentences.

The story behind it is much bigger.

Cracked Foundations is where I have been telling that story—the addiction, the violence, the homelessness, the absurdity, the grief, and the things we somehow survived.

Not cleaned up.

Not written from a safe distance.

Written while some of the consequences are still unfolding.

On Monday, I’m dropping the next chapter free for everyone. No paywall.

If the victim card brought you here, start there.

Then, if you want to understand how a life gets from normal to this—

welcome to Cracked Foundations

Please Subscribe. 🖤

substack.com/@crackedfoundations

Apparently, I have a victim card.

I didn’t know there was one until I saw a post online offering to trade a White Privilege Card for one.

According to the ad, the Victim Card comes with better benefits.

Free food.

Free housing.

Free education.

Free everything.

Fuck.

I’ve been using mine wrong.

Because I have a victim card.

I’ve used it in addiction.

I’ve used it fleeing domestic violence.

I’ve used it trying to get a hospital bed.

I’ve used it in shelters, emergency rooms, outreach offices, police stations and courtrooms.

I’ve pulled that fucking card out more times than I care to count.

And nobody has given me the free housing yet.

What they have given me is a file.

A very big one.

Because there is another side to becoming a victim that we don’t talk about nearly enough.

Once you enter the systems designed to help you, you begin leaving pieces of yourself everywhere.

Shelter A knows you had a breakdown.

Shelter B knows you broke a rule.

Someone writes down that you were agitated.

Someone else writes that you were difficult.

Another person records that you left.

Another records that you came back.

Maybe you were using.

Maybe you were withdrawing.

Maybe you were terrified.

Maybe you hadn’t slept.

Maybe you were having one of the worst fucking days of your life.

The circumstances eventually become smaller than the notation.

And the notation follows you.

I know this because somewhere along the way, three letters appeared on my own file.

DNA.

Not the kind they collect at a crime scene.

Do Not Admit.

Those words exist beside my name across this province.

Some of them, I’m sure, I earned.

I’m not going to rewrite my history to make myself easier to sympathize with.

There were times I was addicted.

Times I was angry.

Times I didn’t follow rules.

Times trauma walked into a room several minutes before the reasonable version of me arrived.

There were probably places that had very legitimate reasons for deciding they couldn’t manage me anymore.

And then there were others where maybe somebody simply didn’t like the new girl.

It doesn’t really matter now.

Because once something becomes part of your record, the explanation doesn’t necessarily travel with it.

The label does.

That’s when you discover the expiration date on the Victim Card.

Eventually you have been helped too many times.

Needed too much.

Failed somewhere.

Relapsed.

Returned.

Left.

Came back.

Became complicated.

And complicated victims aren’t nearly as easy to help as grateful ones.

Then came the Tuesday morning when the man I had spent years trying to escape finished his sentence.

I sat on the Dartmouth waterfront staring across the harbour, waiting.

At 11 a.m., my phone rang.

Victim Services.

He had been released.

His forwarding address was in HRM.

Corrections was in HRM.

I had expected him to return to Amherst.

Instead, he would be walking the same sidewalks as me.

I couldn’t cross the bridge that day.

Every man in a hoodie caught my attention.

Every construction site made me look twice.

Every safety vest sent my anxiety a little higher.

Then another unknown number appeared on my phone.

Except unknown numbers aren’t really unknown to me anymore.

They’ll ask for Mary.

My heart rate accelerated.

The only people who call me Mary, my first name, are the police.

Bingo.

I answered the call and won the jackpot.

Halifax Regional Police.

They wanted to meet me at an undisclosed location.

With reluctance, I agreed.

Because when the police want to meet you somewhere nobody else knows about, you don’t need anyone to explain that your situation has just gone up a level or two.

The calls continued.

A move was imminent.

Within twelve hours, movers arrived.

Police escorted me while I gathered what belongings I could carry.

Then I got into an Uber.

The police escorted my Uber to the highway.

I left the city that had been my home for seven years.

Because of one person.

One risk.

One life.

Except the life being interrupted wasn’t his.

It was mine.

The victim paid the price.

Again.

And that’s the part I can’t reconcile.

We understand that someone leaving custody needs somewhere to sleep.

We understand that without housing, stability and support, the likelihood of returning to the same behaviours increases.

And we should understand that.

People leaving incarceration need somewhere to go.

But shouldn’t the woman leaving because she is afraid of the person coming out of custody deserve somewhere to go too?

Instead, the worst moments of her own life can still be waiting for her at the next door.

The breakdowns.

The addiction.

The behaviour while traumatized.

The previous stays.

Three letters beside her name.

DNA.

Do Not Admit.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about that stupid Victim Card joke.

Not that it’s offensive.

I’ve survived considerably worse things than an offensive meme.

It’s the belief underneath it.

That victimhood is somehow a position of privilege.

That there are rewards waiting for you once something sufficiently terrible happens.

Housing.

Food.

Attention.

Sympathy.

A system rushing forward to catch you.

I wish.

What nobody puts on the card is the fine print.

Benefits subject to availability.

Previous trauma may affect eligibility.

Past behaviour follows applicant indefinitely.

Safety not guaranteed.

The person who hurt you may eventually finish his sentence.

You may continue serving yours.

So yes.

I have a Victim Card.

It has been presented at shelters, hospitals, police stations, courtrooms and outreach offices.

There were no points accumulated.

No rewards.

Just a record of some of the worst moments of my life, documented and carried forward long after the moments themselves had passed.

His sentence ended.

His file told the system he was free.

Mine followed me out of the city.

So keep the Victim Card.

I’ve learned what it’s worth.

I just want someone to answer one question.

If my history follows me from door to door, why doesn’t his?

Apparently, sympathy is easier to find than a bed.

It’s been several weeks.

He gets out Tuesday.

Which sounds considerably less terrifying than saying I have only hours until the gate at Burnside opens and he walks free while I am still trying to escape.

I have spent the last several weeks doing exactly what women are told to do.

Ask for help.

So I did.

Politicians.

Shelters.

Outreach workers.

Victim services.

Anyone who might know someone who knows someone who has a door that locks and a bed behind it.

Everyone has been kind.

Everyone is concerned.

Everyone agrees this is terrible.

There has been an impressive amount of sympathy.

Just no bed.

Apparently, we have successfully created a system where everyone can agree a woman is in danger without anyone actually having somewhere for her to go.

It’s almost impressive.

Almost.

And my fear isn’t hypothetical.

Before Brad left Niagara for Nova Scotia, his involvement with the criminal justice system was already extensive.

Following the death of a friend, Brad retaliated by throwing a Molotov cocktail into an apartment building where a woman connected to the situation lived.

He eventually left Ontario for Nova Scotia.

He still has an outstanding warrant in Ontario.

So when I say I am afraid of what happens when the gate at Burnside opens, I am not afraid because I don’t know what Brad is capable of.

I am afraid because I do.

Tonight, I got on my bike.

I rode around Halifax for what felt like miles.

Maybe it was miles.

I honestly don’t know.

I passed buildings and people and traffic and intersections I have travelled a hundred times before, but I couldn’t tell you much about any of them.

All I remember seeing was the tunnel in front of me.

And it didn’t have an end.

This city has been my home.

It has also been the place where I learned exactly how invisible a person can become while standing directly in front of everyone asking for help.

Tonight I wanted to ride through it one more time before everything changes again.

Before Tuesday.

Before I start looking over my shoulder.

Before every man walking behind me becomes someone I have to notice.

Before every unexpected knock makes my stomach drop.

Before I start calculating exits again.

There is something almost comical about preparing for someone’s release from jail when you are the person who has done nothing wrong.

He gets released.

I get precautions.

He gets his freedom.

I get advice.

Be careful.

Stay somewhere safe.

Don’t travel alone.

Keep your phone charged.

Call if you need us.

Excellent.

I would absolutely love to stay somewhere safe.

That’s actually been the fucking plan.

I’ve made phone calls.

I’ve sent messages.

I’ve told my story again and again, reducing years of my life into the bullet points necessary to explain why Tuesday matters.

And people care.

I need to make that clear.

They care.

Some of them care deeply.

Friends have checked on me.

Strangers have offered encouragement.

People who haven’t seen me in decades have reached out and offered couches, spare rooms, prayers and listening ears.

That has meant more than I can explain.

But compassion and infrastructure are two very different things.

One can keep you from feeling alone.

The other is supposed to keep you alive.

Tonight I have plenty of the first.

I’m still looking for the second.

So I ride.

My legs keep moving even when my brain doesn’t seem capable of going anywhere except Tuesday.

I wonder what he is thinking tonight.

I wonder if he is counting the hours too.

I hate that I wonder.

I hate that after all this time he can still occupy space in my head without paying fucking rent.

Especially considering how difficult housing is to find in Halifax.

At least somebody has accommodation tonight.

Dark humour.

It’s cheaper than therapy and considerably easier to access than emergency housing.

So if I get murdered tonight, please don’t say nobody saw it coming.

Don’t say there weren’t warning signs.

Don’t say we need to have a conversation about protecting women.

We’ve had the conversation.

I’ve had it with practically everyone.

What we need is somewhere for people to go when the conversation ends.

I don’t want to become another story people share with sad emojis and promises that something has to change.

I want to keep writing my own.

Tonight, that’s what I’m trying to protect.

Not just my life.

My right to have a next chapter.

Tuesday isn’t here yet.

Neither is the end of that tunnel.

So tonight, I keep pedalling.

The Halifax numbers are in. The cheaper option is also the more humane one.

There is a particular argument we hear whenever homelessness comes up.

We can’t afford to house everyone.

We can’t afford all those supports.

We can’t keep throwing taxpayers’ money at the problem.

Except Halifax is already throwing an extraordinary amount of money at homelessness.

We’re just spending much of it after people become homeless.

On shelters.

Hospitals.

Police.

Courts.

Corrections.

Encampments.

Emergency responses.

A June 2026 report commissioned by the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia and prepared by ATN Strategies examined the costs of homelessness in the Halifax Regional Municipality.

The numbers make one thing extraordinarily difficult to ignore:

We are paying more to manage homelessness than solve it.

And behind every one of those numbers is a person.

The Price of a Bed

Here is what different responses cost per person in HRM, according to the report:

Correctional services: $9,570 per month
Hospital bed: $6,300 per month
Emergency shelter: $5,162 per month
Supportive housing: $2,763 per month

Annually, the contrast becomes even harder to explain.

Keeping one person in a Nova Scotia correctional facility is estimated at $114,840 a year.

An emergency shelter bed averages $61,944 a year.

Supportive housing averages $33,156 a year, including housing and support services.

Read those numbers again.

We can spend almost $62,000 a year providing someone with an emergency shelter bed, or roughly $33,000 providing supportive housing.

That is a difference of almost $29,000.

And at the end of the first option, the person is still homeless.

Supportive housing isn’t simply an apartment. The model described in the report can include mental-health and addiction counselling, help accessing healthcare, case management, assistance with budgeting and daily living, employment support and other services matched to the person’s needs.

In other words, it attempts to address the things that make it difficult for someone to get housed and stay housed.

Halifax Has Changed

The 2024 Point-in-Time Count recorded at least 1,132 people experiencing homelessness in HRM in a single night.

More than 120 were children.

The report says homelessness in HRM had more than doubled since 2022.

And even 1,132 isn’t the whole picture.

Forty percent of people surveyed reported recent episodes of hidden homelessness: staying temporarily with friends or family, sleeping in vehicles or moving between temporary arrangements.

Those people are easy to miss because homelessness does not always look like a tent.

It can look like a couch.

A car.

A motel.

A borrowed room.

A person carrying everything important to them because they don’t know where they will be sleeping next week.

The report also found that 75 percent of those surveyed reported chronic homelessness.

This isn’t an occasional emergency anymore.

It is a system.

Homelessness Gets Expensive Very Quickly

Once someone loses stable housing, the cost doesn’t disappear.

It moves.

A person gets sick.

An ambulance is called.

They go to an emergency department.

They are discharged without somewhere appropriate to recover.

They return to a shelter, a temporary arrangement or the street.

Another crisis happens.

Police become involved.

Another hospital visit.

Another shelter stay.

Another court appearance.

The bill moves between departments, ministries and levels of government, but it never actually goes away.

And neither does the homelessness.

The report describes precisely this cycle.

People experiencing homelessness are more likely to encounter police, not necessarily because they are inherently more criminal, but because homelessness happens in public.

Sleeping happens in public.

Survival happens in public.

And conditions attached to bail, parole or probation can become extremely difficult to satisfy when someone doesn’t have a stable address.

The result can be a revolving door between streets, shelters, police stations, courts and correctional facilities.

Nova Scotia’s estimated cost of incarceration?

$319 per person, per day.

$114,840 per year.

We apparently can find $114,840 to incarcerate someone.

Finding $33,156 to provide supportive housing somehow becomes a debate.

Then There Is Healthcare

Homelessness doesn’t simply coexist with poor health.

Living without stable housing can make existing health problems harder to manage and create new ones.

The report says people experiencing homelessness are about five times more likely to be admitted for chronic health conditions than the general population, and more than 74 percent have at least one major health problem.

The report also notes that healthcare costs may actually be underestimated because some unhoused people don’t seek treatment, leave emergency departments before being seen, or delay care until their condition becomes much more serious.

Housing changes that equation.

The Halifax Housing First Initiative cited in the report found that after people were housed, the number of clients requiring even one emergency-room visit fell by nearly 29 percent over 12 months.

Inpatient hospital admissions dropped by more than half.

That matters.

Not just because it saves money.

Because it means fewer human beings living from crisis to crisis.

Even Clearing Homelessness Costs Money

In 2024, Halifax spent more than $33,000 clearing three encampments, according to the report.

That covered things such as removing tents and belongings, waste cleanup, remediation and additional security.

And even that figure doesn’t capture all the staff time involving municipal departments, police, fire and social services.

Think about the absurdity of that cycle.

People have nowhere to live.

They establish an encampment.

Public resources are spent managing it.

Public resources are spent dismantling it.

The people still have nowhere to live.

So they go somewhere else.

We have spent money.

We have moved homelessness.

We have not ended it.

There Is Another Number We Should Be Talking About

$595.

According to information gathered from service providers for the report, some organizations in HRM can provide deeply affordable housing, including some staff support, for as little as $595 per month.

That type of housing isn’t appropriate for everyone. People with complex medical, mental-health, substance-use or other needs may require significantly more intensive supportive housing.

But many people don’t.

Some people become homeless primarily because they cannot afford housing.

For them, deeply affordable housing can prevent homelessness before the shelter, hospital, police and correctional systems ever become involved.

That distinction matters enormously.

Not everyone experiencing homelessness requires the same solution.

Some need rent they can afford.

Some need temporary assistance.

Some need intensive, permanent support.

And some need all of those things at different points in their lives.

And Then There Is the Cost That Doesn’t Fit Into a Government Spreadsheet

The report calls these the human costs of homelessness.

Loss of privacy.

Loss of autonomy.

Loss of security.

Exposure to violence.

Isolation.

Interrupted education.

Damaged relationships.

Trauma.

The exhausting uncertainty of not knowing where you are going to sleep.

The report describes how the constant work of meeting basic survival needs leaves people with little capacity to focus on longer-term goals.

That might be the most important point in the entire report.

We expect people to fix their lives while they are still trying to survive them.

Find employment.

Attend appointments.

Address addiction.

Manage mental health.

Take medication.

Keep documents safe.

Charge a phone.

Eat.

Sleep.

Stay clean.

Stay safe.

And somehow find an apartment in one of the most difficult housing markets in the country.

Then we call it a personal failure when they can’t.

We Already Have the Money

That’s what I keep coming back to.

The argument isn’t really whether society should spend money on homelessness.

We already are.

We’re spending it on the ambulance after the crisis.

The emergency room after someone’s health deteriorates.

The police officer responding to the call.

The court appearance.

The correctional bed.

The shelter bed.

The encampment cleanup.

Then we repeat the process.

What the Halifax numbers force us to ask is much simpler:

What if we spent more of that money before the crisis?

What if a shelter were actually an emergency stop instead of somewhere people became stuck because there was nowhere affordable to go?

What if someone leaving a hospital had a home in which to recover?

What if someone leaving jail had an address?

What if a woman leaving violence didn’t have to choose between unsafe housing and homelessness?

What if we stopped demanding that people become stable before giving them the very thing that makes stability possible?

A door.

A bed.

An address.

A place where their belongings can remain when they leave the room.

A place where they can sleep without wondering what happens next.

A home.

Because according to the numbers Halifax now has in front of it, this isn’t simply the compassionate choice.

It may also be the cheaper one.

We have spent years asking whether we can afford to house people.

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

How much longer can we afford to keep people homeless?

Source: Costs of Homelessness in HRM: Benefits of Supportive Housing, Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia / ATN Strategies, June 2026.

738778_b3673a70ab0e4d7891d5069292189802.pdf

In three days, the man who permanently changed my life will be released from jail.

For months, that date has sat quietly on my calendar.

Now it’s here.

I’ve spent the past weeks doing everything I know how to do. Reaching out to shelters. Politicians. Outreach workers. Victim Services. Looking for one thing.

A safe place to live.

Not because I want anything special.

Because I want an address he doesn’t know.

People often think the hardest part is leaving an abusive relationship.

Sometimes the hardest part comes long after you’ve left.

It’s living with the uncertainty that follows.

Trying to rebuild while wondering if your safety has an expiry date.

I’m anxious.

I’m scared.

I’m overwhelmed.

But I’m still here.

And I’ll keep writing.

Because if my story helps even one person understand what life after domestic violence can really look like, then every difficult word has been worth it.

People often ask why I continue to tell this story.

This is why.

Domestic violence doesn’t always end when the relationship ends. For many survivors, the fear, the barriers, and the fight to simply feel safe continue long after the headlines fade and the court case is over.

Sometimes surviving the violence is only the beginning. Surviving what comes after is another story entirely.

— Tabatha

Read more:
substack.com/@crackedfoundations

I am writing to you both as my MLA and as the Leader of the Official Opposition because I urgently need your assistance.

I am currently living in second-stage housing through Alice House after fleeing a long-term abusive relationship. My time in the program is coming to an end, yet I still do not have a safe and secure place to live within Halifax Regional Municipality.

My former partner is scheduled to be released from the Burnside Correctional Centre on August 11 after serving less than nine months in custody. He was convicted of two counts of assault with a weapon, two additional assaults, uttering threats, and he has a previous aggravated assault conviction. Those convictions tell only part of the story. They do not reflect the years of coercive control, intimidation, isolation, and violence that occurred behind closed doors and were never reported.

Like many survivors, I stayed silent for far too long. When I finally found the courage to leave, I believed that safety would follow. Instead, I now face the possibility of leaving second-stage housing without a safe home just as the person who abused me is returning to the community.

I did everything our justice system asked of me. I reported the abuse. I cooperated with the investigation. I testified in court. I relived some of the darkest moments of my life so that there could be accountability. Yet today, I find myself facing the possibility of losing my safe housing before the person convicted of abusing me is released from custody. That should never happen.

I am asking for your assistance in helping me secure safe, affordable housing within Halifax Regional Municipality before August 11. I am also asking that you advocate on my behalf with the appropriate provincial departments so that my safety is recognized and protected.

My situation highlights a larger issue that affects many survivors across Nova Scotia. Domestic violence does not end because a housing program reaches its maximum stay. The danger does not disappear because a calendar says our time is up. Survivors should not be forced to choose between homelessness, unsafe housing, or living in fear. Safety should determine when support ends, not an arbitrary timeline.

Over the past two years, I have worked hard to rebuild my life. I have focused on healing, maintaining my recovery, and creating a stable future after years of abuse and trauma. I want the opportunity to continue moving forward without the constant fear that my safety could be compromised because I have nowhere secure to live.

I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking for the opportunity to live safely and with dignity.

I would be deeply grateful for the opportunity to meet with you or a member of your office as soon as possible. I am also asking that you advocate with the provincial departments responsible for housing and victim services to explore every available option to ensure I am not left without safe accommodation when my current placement ends.

I have copied this letter to the Premier, the Department of Growth and Development, the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women, and Victim Services because I believe my situation demonstrates a gap in our system that deserves immediate attention. Survivors who have done everything asked of them should not find themselves without safe housing while the person convicted of abusing them is returning to the community.

Because of the urgency of my circumstances and the August 11 release date, I would sincerely appreciate any assistance or response at your earliest convenience.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter and for your service to our community. I remain hopeful that, with your help, a safe solution can be found before my current housing ends.

Respectfully,

Tabatha Garvock

902-804-5623 

Tabathagarvock2@hotmail.com

I never understood self-harm.

Not really.

Back in rehab in Peterborough, my roommate’s body was a map of old wounds. Scar layered over scar until there was barely any untouched skin left. Looking at her, I couldn’t understand it.

Why would someone already carrying so much pain choose to add more?

At the time, I thought I was looking at the injury.

I didn’t realize I was looking at the language of pain.

She wasn’t trying to show the world what she was feeling.

She was trying to survive feelings she didn’t know how to carry.

Years later, I finally understood the difference.

Read more

The days, weeks, even months before I left for Peterborough, I knew I was falling apart.

My benzodiazepine use was escalating. So was the Tito’s vodka mixed with Red Bull. What had begun as medication prescribed to manage the symptoms of Graves’ disease had slowly become something else entirely. A neglectful physician, repeated prescriptions, emergency room visits, doctor shopping, and a growing dependence had created a storm I no longer knew how to control.

I was spiraling.

At the same time, my youngest daughter had left for university, leaving me to live alone for the first time in my life.

I sold all of my furniture. I let my lease expire. I had no plan, no direction, and very little reason to stay where I was.

Around that time, I had been chatting with a man I met through an online dating site. He travelled regularly between Nova Scotia and Ontario and asked if I wanted to join him for a few days.

I wasn’t interested in him romantically.

If I’m being honest, I saw a free trip and a chance to escape my own life for a while.

Read more

The condo is gone.

The walls that held so much chaos have finally fallen silent.

If this were a movie, this is probably where the credits would begin to roll.

But life doesn’t work that way.

Because by now you know where I ended up.

You know about the addiction.

The violence.

The homelessness.

The grief.

You know how the story looks from the outside.

What you don’t know is how I got there.

People often ask a single question.

“How did you end up in a relationship like that?”

Or…

“How did someone like you become addicted?”

The truth is, they’re asking the wrong question.

They’re looking at the result instead of the sequence.

No one becomes addicted in a day.

No one wakes up in an abusive relationship overnight.

No one loses everything in a single decision.

Lives unravel one compromise at a time.

One prescription.

One excuse.

One ignored warning.

One person.

One choice.

One day that doesn’t seem important until years later.

Before there was F60.81…

Before there was crack…

Before there were shelters…

Before there was Boston’s death…

There was another woman.

One who still believed she could fix herself.

To understand everything that comes next…

We have to go back.

Today is August 1.

For months, this date has existed only as a number on a calendar. A marker I couldn’t stop counting toward.

Ten days.

Now it isn’t measured in months anymore.

It’s measured in mornings.

In nights.

In hours.

In minutes.

The countdown has become impossible to ignore.

For almost two years, my address has been a secret.

Not because I enjoy living in hiding.

Because surviving required it.

I have lived in security-enforced housing behind locked doors, cameras, safety plans, confidential addresses, and routines carefully designed so that one person could not find me.

Or perhaps I should say lived.

Today, my lease ends.

Not because the danger has ended.

Not because I suddenly became safe.

Because the calendar says my time is up.

Ten days from now, the man I call F60.81 will walk out of the Burnside Correctional Centre after serving less than ten months in custody. He was convicted of two counts of assault with a weapon, two additional assaults, uttering threats, and he has a previous aggravated assault conviction from a prior incident.

This, with many years of incarceration before that fateful meeting.

Those convictions tell only part of the story.

They don’t include the years of coercive control.

The isolation.

The intimidation.

The fear.

The violence that happened behind closed doors and was never reported because, like so many survivors, I believed silence was safer than speaking.

When I finally left, I believed safety would follow.

Instead, I find myself losing the very place designed to protect me just as the person convicted of abusing me prepares to return to the same city.

There is something profoundly unsettling about a system where protection expires because a lease does, not because the risk does.

Violence doesn’t follow rental agreements.

Fear doesn’t recognize the end of the month.

Six months ago, my social media accounts were hacked.

With them went information that should never have been exposed.

My confidential address.

Communications involving police.

Lawyers.

Victim Services.

The safeguards that existed for nearly two years were compromised in a matter of hours.

So was my sense of security.

Long before court, I was warned.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Don’t talk to the cops.”

But eventually, that choice wasn’t mine anymore.

The court subpoenaed my testimony.

I did exactly what our justice system asks survivors to do.

I reported the abuse.

I cooperated with investigators.

I testified.

I sat in a courtroom and relived some of the darkest moments of my life so there could be accountability.

People often say survivors should come forward.

What they rarely ask is what happens after they do.

Because accountability doesn’t always feel like safety.

Sometimes it feels like a countdown.

Ten days.

Nine.

Eight.

A calendar moving steadily toward a date I never wanted to reach.

I don’t know what August 11 will bring.

I only know that recovery is difficult enough without wondering whether the protections that kept you alive will disappear before the danger does.

No survivor should have to watch the calendar this way.

No survivor’s safety should expire simply because the month does.

Sometimes the longest sentence isn’t the one handed down in court. It’s the one survivors continue to live after it ends.

Lower Water Street didn’t last long.

By then, Boston was coming and going almost as often as the police.

F60.71 had developed a pattern whenever life became difficult. He’d disappear for a few days, usually into a shelter, waiting for the dust to settle while I stayed behind to deal with whatever was left.

The police.

The landlords.

The neighbours.

The evictions.

By then, I’d lost count.

Five.

Six.

Maybe more.

Each one ended the same way.

F60.71 disappeared.

I stayed.

When the sheriff finally arrived, I returned to collect whatever remained of our lives. I took only what I could carry, sell, or store. Everything else had become another casualty of the life we were living.

I was alone.

The sheriffs were patient.

I wasn’t.

Sarcasm had become my armour, and they happened to be standing in front of it. I filled the silence with sharp comments and misplaced anger, directing my frustration at people who were simply doing their jobs.

Looking back, I know they weren’t really the target.

They were just the ones who were there.

Then someone knocked at the door.

I barely looked up.

I assumed it was another official. Another interruption in a day already full of them.

When I opened the door, two men in suits introduced themselves.

They were undercover RCMP officers.

Everything inside me changed.

Read more

There are days when the world feels like it’s ending.

Not in a dramatic, movie-style explosion, but in the quiet, personal way.

The bank account is empty.

Your phone is down to two percent.

Your dealer has disappeared.

The last real meal feels like a distant memory.

You’re pacing. Sweating. Convinced something terrible is about to happen.

Most of the time, nothing does.

Because the truth is, the world keeps turning.

I used to joke that I was a doomsday prepper. Just not the kind with canned food and emergency generators.

My survival kit was three Clazzys, a Red Bull, a Bic lighter, some weed, and a cracked iPhone with no data.

It sounds ridiculous now.

Back then, it felt completely rational.

I ran through back alleys in slippers.

I cried in front of bank tellers, hoping they’d reverse overdraft fees I knew I couldn’t pay.

I justified decisions I never imagined making.

Read more