What A Roof Holds

I see them every morning on my way to workI have learned to look directly then refocus, and I keep movingI don’t know what that makes me. Honest, maybe. Or just human. There is a man I pass sometimes, I noticed something on the ground near him and my brain did that thing where it registers an image before it understands it and I kept looking. A cement bag. The kind that construction sites leave in piles, thick grey paper, dusty at the edges. He had folded himself into it from the waist down. It took me a while to understand that it was functioning as a blanket. As bedding. As the thing between his body and the cold ground.I have thought about that cement bag almost every day sinceNot with pity exactlySomething quieter than pity. At times I am just curious, what is going on inside that head. What does a person think about when survival is not a metaphor but a literal, hourly negotiation?I think about my mental health constantly. I check in with myself, evaluate, ask am I okay, am I doing okay.It is a luxury I have never once named as a luxury until I saw a man sleeping in a cement bag and understood that the ability to introspect requires a baseline. You cannot examine your inner life when your inner life is entirely occupied by the question of where you will sleep tonight. This is what a roof does. Not just shelter you. It gives your mind somewhere to be. A domain, a container, the thing that makes the inner world possible. Maslow put shelter at the bottom of his pyramid and I used to think that was obvious, almost too simple to say. I do not think that anymore. I think it is the whole thing. I think everything else, growth, connection, self-knowledge, the ability to want more for yourself…I think all of it is downstream of having four walls and something above your head that keeps the rain out. I am grateful. I want to say that without it being a performance. I am genuinely, specifically grateful for a roof, for a bed, for a family that kept me, for the life that was handed to me before I was old enough to earn it or lose it. These are not things I made. I did not choose the family, the house, the love that was already there when I arrived. And I am aware that somewhere between the bridge and my front door is a distance I did not cross by merit alone. But here is the thing I have been sitting with,I am not where I want to be. I am still mid-arrival, still in the early pages of the life I am trying to build, and there are days when that gap between where I am and where I imagined I would be by now feels enormous. I carry the weight of expectations my own, and the ones that belong to people who love me and have quietly been waiting. Some mornings that weight is the first thing I feel when I wake up. And then I get on the road and I see him. The man. The cement bag.And I think about the relativity of lack. How everyone is somebody else’s at least. How my dissatisfaction, which is real, which I am not dismissing, is also a kind of privilege, the privilege of wanting more from a position of having enough. My sadness has a roof over it. My longing has a bed to sleep in. My frustration with my own life gets to exist in a warm room, and that is not nothing, that is not a small thing, that is almost everything. I do not think gratitude cancels grief. I do not think noticing someone else’s suffering means you are not allowed your own. But I think privilege is a mercy. I think being reminded what the floor actually looks like is a mercy I think that is the world offering you something to be grateful for…I want more for my life and I am going to build itBut I will not forget my privilege.

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