Eviction is a Black Hole

Eviction is a black hole. It's an endless dark that annihilates you future-first. It kills hope, then memory. It wants your home, and it wants to make sure you’ll never have one again. It’s cosmic violence on the municipal scale. 

As a kid I watched it suck the light out of the sky and the life out of my mom. By the time I could read I knew what a 72-hour notice was and what it meant. Even then I knew, play your cards right and it doesn’t end with a sheriff. Doesn’t end with a miracle either. Just surrender. Get out before the court date and your record stays clean-ish. Stay too long and the court holds you down and brands you, searing your eviction record onto your skin. Indelible. Inescapable. Better to just leave, disappear, that’s all they want.

So that’s what I did. Any time it came close, I adapted. I became everything I had to be to stay ahead of the pull: resourceful, invisible, expendable. It never leaves you, the feeling that home is disposable, uncertain, that it can be taken away with the stroke of a pen. 

This time I stayed too long. It's July. No job, not enough freelance work to cover rent. I’ve been making ends meet by selling everything worth selling, my laptop, my body, my mind, and parts of myself. Fire sale. Everything must go. Including and especially me. 

At the time of this writing, I’ve got 24 hours. But renting is always living on borrowed time. A lease isn’t a home it’s a countdown. Rent’s just a bribe you pay to put 30 days between you and the event horizon.

There were 6,375 evictions filed in King County from July 2024 to March 2025. Mine was one of 812 filed in April. 

The worst part is I know I'm one of the lucky ones. No major health problems. No kids. Just broke and broken in socially acceptable ways—mostly. I’m packing up for an era of couch surfing with no steady paycheck, back rent and fees owed, and I’m still one of the lucky ones. Limited dissemination. Neutral rental reference. My record came out dinged but not destroyed – this time.

If you ever feel like your situation is hopeless, go down to the legal aid office at your local courthouse on eviction day. Even if your name is on the docket, you’ll thank whatever god that will listen that your situation isn’t worse. Because down there, no matter what, you will see worse and you will never un-see it. 

Single moms, old people, crushed to death by the relentless, dehumanizing bureaucracy of forcibly prying people out of their homes. 

Everyone’s piled into the same hallway, told to sign in, and wait till someone calls your name. A lawyer comes out, and you just kinda scooch down the benches past the other condemned and talk quiet. 

They mean well, the fresh-faced, caffeine-shaky kids dispensing legal palliative care. They know most of us aren’t walking out with homes—just time. Some of them would fight god bare-knuckled and bloody if it got you an extra few days to pack up your one-bed one-bath. Others, you can tell when they look at you that they’re not really there. I can’t blame them. Every day they have to look at people on the worst day of their lives and tell them they can’t make it better. 

I’m writing this from Waterwheel Lounge, a dive bar sandwiched between two apartment buildings. Been here longer than I’ve been alive. Karaoke. Country nights. Real-deal working-class dive on Ballard’s north-south artery, 15th avenue. This year it’s getting bulldozed to make way for more empty condos stacked like fresh, uncut tombstones in gentrifier gray.

There’s a housing crisis after all. Gotta build 'em up fast—doesn’t matter if nobody can afford 'em. Learn to code. Get a gig or three. Then maybe you can rent your way into a luxury mausoleum with granite countertops, built on the bones of a city forgetting itself one dive bar at a time. 

I wrote most of this back in July. It's January now, and there's a lease sitting in my inbox, waiting for my signature. I'm elated, but I'm also terrified. It's a nice space, in a nice part of Seattle. I'll be sharing a roof with people I care about. But I'm still scared. Having a home again means it can be taken away, again. But that's never not true, is it? Hope and fear are sisters, after all.

I'll sign the lease, reset the countdown, and hope to stay ahead of it this time.

I won't forget I'm one of the lucky ones.