No Fixed Address – An Introduction

The few of you who follow (and hopefully read) me regularly, know me as a fiction writer — I typically manage two stories a week, every Monday and Thursday, strange tales spun from stranger places. That won’t change. The fictions will continue. The ghosts and aliens and memory glitches and strange girls at the bus stop will all keep coming.

But starting this week, Sundays will be different.

I’m calling the new segment No Fixed Address — not just because it sounds poetic (though it does), but because it’s now my legal truth. I don’t have a home. Not an apartment. Not a room. Not even a couch.

As of February 18th, I was evicted from the small rented room I’d lived in for nearly a decade. I sleep upright on the subway most nights. I apply for jobs constantly. I carry everything I own. I’m not telling you this for pity. I’m telling you because it’s happening, and because I believe truth deserves to be written down.

So on Sundays, I’ll post about that truth:
The logistics, the humiliations, the loopholes, the kindnesses, the cold.
What it’s like to find a public restroom when you have nowhere to go back to. What it’s like to smile at people who step around you like you’re a trash bag with eyes. What it’s like to still write stories in your head while watching a cop gently nudge a man awake so he won’t freeze to death.

These entries won’t be pretty. They won’t be polished. But they’ll be mine. And if you’ve ever read anything I’ve written and thought, “I see something of myself in this,” then maybe you’ll see something in these, too.

So:

  • Mondays & Thursdays: Fiction.
  • Sundays: No Fixed Address.
  • And the rest of the time, I’ll be out there, living it.

Stay with me if you can.
Read if you’re willing.
And if you’ve ever loved a story I told — now might be the time to send some positivity my way to help me live long enough to write more.

Ciao til next now.

—Rhyan