JASON

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

JASON’S STORY

Had a kinda crappy childhood. You know, I guess it wasn’t really much worse than anybody else’s, but it seemed pretty bad to me.

When I was like twenty, my mom, me and the younger siblings, who all have a different dad than me, decided to move. all have a different dad than me, decided to move. My mom had been divorced for a couple of years and so we moved to where all her family was. That’s when it started. I, every once in a while, would find myself taking a pain pill. That led me to doing heroin. Then my heroin addiction got really, really bad. Which, by the end of it, got to be almost fourteen years. During that, I spent a little time in prison.

In February, almost three years ago, I was on my mom’s couch. She basically told me, “You’re thirty-one years old now. I can’t take care of you anymore. It’s time for you to figure something out.” She dropped me off at the front steps of the Victory Mission in eight inches of snow and it was ten degrees outside. I was there for a year and a half, went through their recovery programs. Got pretty close to God at the time. Walked out of the Victory Mission with a good job.

However, I was hiding from a lot of people the fact that I was still shooting meth and taking pain pills almost every day. I just had got really good at hiding it from everybody, nobody knew that I was on drugs. A month or two after that I almost overdosed on meth and ended up losing my job.

Even though I’d been homeless, I’d never really been on the streets. Then one day I found myself looking for somewhere to sleep. I was feeling bad because that day, for the first time in almost two years, I used heroin again, when I started a relationship with this girl a few years back.

At the moment, the hardest thing about being on the streets is being alone. It’s kinda sad to say this, but honestly the biggest thing I’ve learned is that you can’t trust anybody, not fully. I’m the kind of person that wears my heart on my sleeve and that’s all I want to do, is trust and love people. I’m a big teddy bear. But I can’t even take care of myself or anything. Well, barely, I’m surviving.

Also, I want to say that if a little curly blonde-headed girl named Lily June ever sees or hears this, let her know her daddy loves her. I miss her so much.