Margarita, 42, grew up in San Diego. She went to Patrick Henry High where she loved playing dodge ball and volleyball. There were lots of drugs in high school, she said, which had a big influence on her and other students’ lives after graduation. She started working early. At age 12 she was working at a tee shirt shop at Kobey’s Swap meet, then waitressing. At age 22 she married the general manager at a House of Pancakes restaurant where she was waitressing. they have two children.

The trouble really started when she was in recovery.

Margarita has three older sisters and three younger sisters, and it seemed all of them wanted to tell her how to live her life. “They all had their hands in our pockets,” she said of those living closest to her and her husband. “They bartered with the enemy, turning everyone against me, eventually my husband too.”

She spend three years in one program kicking a heroin habit. But dealing with the people in the program was as oppressive as her family relationships. “There are sexual predators in those programs like a mother fucker! And they abuse you in the name of God,” she said. “Well they need to pick another god!”

When she got out, the same old environment waited for her. She tried to move away more than once. Family dynamics kept her in a spin cycle that she couldn’t escape. She started using heroin again. Then ended up in another program. This time when she got out, her father forgave her, she said, and asked her to move back home so he could help. Things were crowded in her father’s house. A nephew and his wife were living there, as well as another couple. They all wanted to tell her how to live her life, and the constant nagging drove her out.

“They had their conscious in my soufflè,” she said. “They were hating on me cuz I could taste life and they couldn’t.” So she hit the streets. Her family all live close to downtown but she doesn’t see them.

The hardest thing about living on the streets, Margarita said, is having no dental plan. Everything else, “as long as you know how to carry yourself, it’s not hard. Trust is a big deal. And faith. Without faith and grace, I don’t think I would be able to make it. I know where I’m going. It’s impossible for me to do bad on my own.”

Margarita said her food stamp card is her savior. “That shit’s real,” she said, of the need for food and water on the street. “The whole nine yards is this small,” she said, using her hands to frame a space the size of a credit card.

She took a look around on the curb where others were packing up their belongings to move aside while city crews swept up debris. She has none of that: the small portable mountains of random possessions under blue plastic tarps. Just the clothes she was wearing. In fact the only possessions she carried were old tickets for riding the trolley without paying, and copies of her metro pass. Asked where she was going to sleep that night, Margarita pointed to her head then the concrete. “From here to the floor…. and the floor is always there.”

Asked if she had ideas on how to get more homeless people into housing, she furrowed her brow and said, “homelessness is a permanent disability. We are reluctant to change because we are lazy and have to be ready learn something. Our ultimate goal is self-destruction. I did this all to myself,” she said.