I would describe my seventeenth year as running with the bulls: I ran as fast as I could from the evils chasing me, and just when I thought I couldn’t run any longer, I made it out. My year in hell began when Papa left Mama for a millennial woman, and continued when we got evicted from our apartment in LA. Nikki moved in with her boyfriend and Mama became a skid row prostitute, selling her wares weekdays, Saturday and Sunday, no extra charge for late night customers. What a role model. My family gave me little hope for feminism progression. I called the eviction The Diaspora, because my entire family was ripped from each other like the slavers ripped the Africans from their homes. It sickened me to see Nikki piercing people’s dirty orifices in her boyfriend’s tattoo parlor, to know Mama was banging with strangers in exchange for a few more grams of pot.
   I pinballed from one shelter to the next for barely a month, only to realize that I was just another high school dropout to the volunteers at the shelters, volunteers who lived comfy two-paycheck lives in low crime neighborhoods, who plastered smiles to their matte masks and felt so relieved that they were not us: homeless, jobless, hardly educated in the prime of our youth. We served as their children’s path to appreciation, the urban zoos. Do you see those animals, locked up in cages, barely getting enough to eat? Don’t get too close! They’re primitive, evolutionary digressions; they only know to attack if they feel threatened.
   When I first started walking the streets, I was so disoriented. Suddenly, the lamp lights seared my eyes, the cars moved too fast, everything moved too fast. I was too slow to catch up. I thought humanity remained in the world, that at seventeen I still wasn’t a lost cause; a caring foster home would take me in and reintegrate me into society. I should have known better. I kicked myself for my naivety. I had to adapt to the streets, beat natural selection: those best suited to their environment are fit to survive. Even so, I could hardly fend off the men stumbling in blind, drunken hazes from their bar stools to me, seeking the comforts of flesh, the burning alcohol in them fueling their animalistic desires.
   About a month after The Diaspora, I was squatting in a rundown Chinese takeout restaurant, praying to the God I no longer believed in that unconsciousness would take me into its soft, welcoming arms so I could escape this ninth circle that trapped me. My ribs showed through my skin, which stuck to me like tacky flypaper, and I could hardly sleep I was so hungry. Hunger ruled my life, a totalitarian government with an iron grip and titanium oppression. I stumbled outside to pick through the dumpsters again, thinking that maybe I would find some tangible food other than booze that I could eat. A man, disheveled, eyes too bright, staggered into the alley, blocking the light of the street lamps.
   “Hey there, sweetheart.” He approached me, eyed my ripped clothes, probably imagined what lay underneath. My stomach growled, audibly, making him grin. “How much you charge?”
   I almost thought he was kidding. Did he think I was a hooker?
   He edged even closer. He couldn't have stood more than five feet away. I could see his face, pockmarked by time like potholes in asphalt. The old me, soft and innocent, would have cringed and screamed and prayed. Now though, I merely eyed him warily, debating his offer.
   “I see you’re desperate,” he continued, when I didn’t refute him outright. “Just so happens I am too. We can make a trade, goods for goods. Simple business transaction, nothing to it.”
   My stomach groaned at the prospect of food, and I winced at the pain. Yet when I opened my mouth, I hesitated. Was I willing to sacrifice my dignity, and succumb to the misogyny of this man thinking he could have me and then discard me like the garbage I was willing to eat? Was I willing to become my mother, another prostitute prowling the streets looking for poor players who hadn’t gotten lucky yet?
   Resolving myself, I turned and fled, tears flowing from my eyes like birthday streamers. I needed to find someone. Nikki, she would help me. When I got to her apartment, the landlord was locking up the place. When she saw me, she stared at me, confused, eyes harder than marble.
   “Do you know the girl who lives here?” I said. “Nikki Kent?”
   The woman took a lazy drag on the cigarette, Barbie-pink five dollar manicure glinting in the dim hallway light. “Her? She and that cheap tool she was living with skipped town about a week ago.”
   “She left?” I couldn’t believe this, wouldn’t believe it.
   “That’s what I just said, girl.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face, and I breathed it in. It didn’t alleviate my pain. It was almost a good thing I didn’t have any money, otherwise I would have spent it all on cigs and drugs like Mama. “Now are you the one who’s gonna pay me the rent I’m owed or what?” The woman said. She blinked at me, fake eyelashes casting shadows on her sunken cheeks.
   Nikki left without even saying goodbye. What a b****.
I couldn’t respond; my throat thickened like cornstarch and my ability to speak failed me. Crying, I fled, and muscle memory took me on the path to where my dysfunctional family used to live. When I realized where I was going, I stopped, turned down a side street, and sank to my knees against a crumbling brick wall. After I had my pathetic pity party, anger began to replace sadness. I learned awhile ago that people would keep knocking me down. I needed to learn how to get back up again.
   At that point, I had nowhere else to go. I had dropped out of school as soon as the landlord evicted us; I wasn’t deluded enough to think I could actually continue doing homework, the science fair, SAT prep, while I could hardly feed myself. Mama’s occupation ruled her out; I didn’t have the address for “the bed of every man in the city.” And Papa? Hell no. He was the one that booted us down a caste level in the first place. Only I could fix my life.
   Actually, my detestment of Papa sparked my need for the world to know how I felt. I found scraps of paper and a blue ink Bic pen, and I needed nothing more. There was nothing romantic about the struggle, but a hell of a lot of downplaying middle class people thought otherwise. I played on their perception of difficulty, began reading my works in coffee shops opposite the end of town Mama worked. People gave me tips, patted me on the back to validate my little ego. God, did my dignity suffer.
   Yet, I could suffer this if it meant getting enough money to buy at least a meal every day. I needed to fulfill my basic Maslovian needs before I could consider my pride. On July twenty-second, seven months and five days after The Diaspora, a man approached me. Compared with the day a guy tried to hook up with me, the day I stopped talking to the male gender entirely, this interaction was a stark difference. This man made an offer nobody in their right mind could refuse, even me, and I hadn’t been in my right mind for God only knows how long.
   He offered me a deal, a one way ticket out of this anarchical life. This man, Mr. Matthew Bates, my mentor, my messiah, offered to hire me to write for him. A ghostwriter, he called it. I had no idea what the hell a ghostwriter was, but I figured it couldn’t differ much with what I was now: a nameless face of the streets writing her tale.
   I moved to New York, and following Nikki’s example, I didn’t say goodbye to Mama. I sure bet she wouldn’t either if she skipped town. When I became an independent writer, my first book, Life of a Dragonfly, became an instant bestseller, and I went on to write much more: poetry, novels, anything. I lived and breathed words, and I still do. Now, I live in Brooklyn, a decade after The Diaspora. I heard from Nikki a few years back; she found a new boyfriend and has two twin girls. I didn’t ask which boyfriend fathered the twins. Two years ago I received a call from a payphone number in LA, and when I answered it, Mama’s frantic voice came through the line. Turn’s out, I now have a half-brother, courtesy of Mama’s prostitute days. She manages a strip club now, not much of an improvement, but the guy who owns the club is her dealer, so it’s a double-base run for Mama.
   I wish I could say that all the homeless, loveless faces that haunted my past found happiness, didn’t OD, didn’t resort to living with abusive older men in exchange for food. Yet I know from my own experience that’s a future I personally could have fallen into, and that many will. I may have recovered from my street days, and my hardships have made me so grateful for what I have, but I always live with the fear I will lose the life I have constructed for myself, that my house of cards will blow over and I’ll realize I should have used cement to lay my foundation. Now, I am harder, stronger than before, but I’ll never forget the year of purgatory I endured when I was seventeen.