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by Kiersten White

The point of a shelter isn’t progress. It’s shelter.

“Donation bins could use tampons more than luck.”

Everything about the shelter is designed to remind them that nothing is theirs.

Those who are best described as aspiring: A social media fitness model A graffiti artist A YouTube prank-show host An app developer-slash-house sitter A jewelry designer-slash-dog walker A zealous CrossFit instructor An actress with severe food allergies Those who are best described as stalled: A writer with severe people allergies A boy equal parts banished and lost The kindest gas station attendant in Pocatello, Idaho A veteran A solar panel salesman An eternal intern And Mack, who is nobody, if she has her way

“Cool story, man,” Ava says. “Tell me about how you walked uphill to school both ways, twenty miles in the snow, and how going to school didn’t put you in six-figure debt, and how your first house cost less than a car, and then I’ll tell you a story about how your generation fucked mine over.”

She’s so sick of trying to turn everything into an opportunity, trying to exploit every hobby, every interest, every talent, even her own fucking face and body in a desperate attempt to make enough money.

People pretend things aren’t wrong, even when they can feel the truth, because they’re too afraid of what it means to look right at the horror, right at the wrongness, to face the truth in all its terrible glory. Like little kids, playing hide-and-seek. If they can’t see the monster, it can’t get them. But it can. It always can. And while you aren’t looking, it’s eating everyone around you.

They were told everything was fine, and so they clung to that promise until they died.

I feel the weight of July most keenly.

Trickle-down economics. They got the economy, and the blood trickled down the decades.

All these lost people, who had worked so hard to carve out a place where they could be successful, where they could be famous, where they could be stable, where they could be loved, where they could be safe. They came here, desperate, lured by the promise of finally winning something, set up to be devoured so people who already had everything would continue having exactly what they already had, what they could have had anyway, what they felt was their due. What they were willing to let fourteen hopeful souls pay for.

To the youngest generations we’ve tasked with saving us all: You shouldn’t have to. I’m so sorry.

Finally, to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck’s sake, look up the origin of the saying.