"If you leave me alone..."

I’m in a room with concrete floors, temporary walls and full of people. All of us are awestruck by the stark story of Brian who sits with his tattooed arms crossed over a tired, 60 year old frame. He opens up to us all, sharing a life story littered with incarceration, speckled with homeless nights and echoing of a journey full of memories impossible to forget. From what he can remember, his story began when he was left orphaned in downtown Toronto at the age of two. It moved through teenage years where he and many forgotten children found their way into gangs for camaraderie, the kind of support that grows into organized crime. The way Brian tells it, he didn’t view homelessness and crime as a choice. He considered it a form of survival.

He’s home now, in an apartment of his own and no longer refers to himself as a client of any particular agency. Instead, he says that he’s a member of an Edmonton church, an employee with an understanding boss and a mentor to others who find themselves on the difficult road home. Peering out of tired eyes, he tells us it took him over a year to grow the courage to speak to anyone at church. So disenfranchised over a lifetime, he couldn’t even grocery shop, let alone make small talk. He simply had no common ground and no language for ‘being normal’.

As the story went on, what seared into my soul was when Brian said, ‘if you leave me alone, I will return to what I know…’ referencing a return to a previous life of survival. It was both a threat and a statement of fact. Bigger prisons and being tough on crime will not keep Brian from re-offending. Each and every day, he finds the courage to be committed to living on this side of prison bars because of the community that embraces him: his friends, his church and the mentees that remind him of his long journey. For Brian, ending homelessness was more than an apartment. It was the building of community that grows hope and sustains change.

Where would you be if left alone?