I began writing about my life experiences. It started with a simple truth; we all need to feel loved. One thing my life has taught me with a certainty is that the absence of caring, nurturing, and supportive bonds in our lives is a debilitating condition that can take years to recover from.
This initial thought lead me to write the prologue for my current novel. It began as a simple meditation; just me putting down in words things I had been feeling for a long time. The feedback I received after sharing it with several residents and employees at the shelter was amazing! Other residents told me I had expressed in one page exactly what was going on in their own heads. The social workers felt like it gave them insight into how it feels to be homeless that they had never gotten anywhere else.
For today's Spotlight On Homelessness, I have decided to share this piece with my readers. It is the only excerpt from my book that I will be sharing online for obvious reasons. It doesn't really have it's own title, however my book is tentatively entitled “The Rhesus Monkey Experience”.
You may be wondering, “where in the world that title came from?”.
No, it is not a book about monkeys...
or chocolate covered candy bars with a peanut butter center...
Rest assured, it will be explained promptly in the first chapter of the book. Fingers crossed, you will all have an opportunity to read the whole thing one day after it is published (and I receive an extremely large advance).
Until then, I think it would be interesting to see if someone can figure out what the title means on their own. I've given enough information in this blog for those who are astute enough to connect the dots. There may be a reward for whoever guesses correctly (Yay! Prizes!). However, if you are someone whom I have already explained this to, please do not respond. I don't think that's really fair, do you?
Without further adieu, here is the prologue to my unfinished book “The Rhesus Monkey Experience”:
The Rhesus Monkey Experience
Prologue
We each had different circumstances which brought us to this place. Of course, none of us wanted to be here, but we knew this was where we needed to be. For some of us, this was an equivalent to rehab. Name your poison: drugs, alcohol, pills, sex. Many of us had demons that we tried desperately to chase away. For some of us, this was a mental health facility; a place where we went screaming for someone, anyone to help us with whatever was wrong with our brains. We needed assistance with that malfunction that made us damn near want to open our skulls and fish around in there until we found the fucked up part and fix it for good.
Those that monitored this place thought it was all about work. If you just got a job, everything would be alright, but I’m not sure I knew one person for whom that was the case. We were all running from something, but couldn’t do it anymore. Our hearts were racing, our throats were burning, and we were gasping for air, searching desperately for an oasis. We hadn’t quite found all that, but what we had found was a family. We jokingly placed each other in the roles of brother, sister, mother, auntie, uncle, nephew, and so on.
On the surface, this was just a game we played. Our little shelter family, each member clinging to their respective baskets, and doing what they could to not let anyone else’s fall. The reality for many of us was that this was the closest we had ever had to an actual family. One that truly loved us, looked out for us, and wanted us to succeed.
I can only speak for myself when I say that I was meant to be in that place that made us wake up early every day (even on the weekend), that place that was almost like rehab, that place that didn’t always understand the extent of the malfunction in our brains. I was meant to be there, because on those four floors of the Delonis Center lived the only true family I had ever known: my shelter family.
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