Alexandra & Skyler

Alexandra from somewhere down the peninsula and her fiercely devoted dog Skyler slept out in the cold next to Elm Street last night, San Francisco.

She’s been unhoused for about a year now and, by her own admission, she does need and she wants to get her shit together. She’s trying to get off the streets, but it’s rather difficult for her to gain admission into any of our at-capacity navigation centers with her most loyal of companions.

So out there again she was, with a terrible cough, in need of water for Skyler and a little something to put in her own belly to keep warm through the night.

I can’t pretend to know her life or to understand her plight, but I know that you can always go home. I am keeping my fingers crossed she does get it together soon, that she is soon welcome home again, for a bit or for a while. She clearly is a young woman with so much still to look forward to living. I hope the vaporú I offered her last night helped her, at the very least, feel better this morning.

There’s so much stigma around needing something around the City of St. Francis these days. You want something, then yeah, by all means: Want it, go get it all, no matter what. But needing? Recognizing need and doing something about it. Nope. Keep walkin’, out of sight ASAP, out o’ mind. Because we gotta keep up, kids. God forbid we take a beat and help up, right.

The audacity of hope is to keep on hoping. And so I keep on hoping, no, not that the world will change but that I am changing it for the better, if only for a moment, if only a little, every day.

P.S.: After I called my contact at the San Francisco Department of Public Health to shine a light on these two, I noticed that a couple of members of the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team were out there making contact.

I hope their story gets many happy new beginnings.