I wake up with my cheek pressed up against the tiled floor, cold and hard. I cannot remember the last time I woke up in an actual bed, with a mattress beneath my bones and a pillow cradling my head. The subway rushes past me. Spilling from its doors are men with briefcases and women with expensive lipstick.

On autopilot I reach for the coffee cup beside me marked “spare change” in my crooked handwriting. It’s empty, but I didn’t expect anything more. In this city, although the streets are full, everyone knows where they’re going and they don’t stop once to look at anyone around them. They pretend that they are in their own little world, their own little bubble. A woman holding one of those 12 dollar coffees immediately puts on her dark sunglasses when she sees me in her peripherals and looks away. It’s winter and we’re indoors. The man across the aisle scrutinizes my tangled beard and tattered windbreaker, judgment etched deep in his dark irises. When my eyes meet his, he immediately looks back down into his newspaper.

I’ve learned long ago that people try to dismiss my existence. I haven’t had anyone be within six feet of me who hasn’t been rushing by. I have forgotten the last time someone has looked me in the eyes. I cannot imagine what it is like to have someone talk to me. I cannot remember how to have a conversation; I only hear voices via eavesdropping and radios. I am a ghost of this city. I wonder if they think that if they can’t see me then I’m not real.

But today I refuse. So I scream, letting words bounce from the ceiling to the walls to the tiled floors, coughing up the clumps of words that collect in the back of my throat. I do not miss the fleeting glances, eyes filled with fear before they go back to pretending I don’t exist, the way their backs tense up and the way their fingers stiffen. I watch the woman with the sunglasses walk away faster, the click of her high heels like a rhythm to my ranting, and the man holds on to his newspaper so tightly that I can see the edges crinkle, the papers threatening to rip apart. But I keep yelling, even when my throat is raw and my own voice starts to crack, when even I don’t understand what the words coming out of my mouth mean.

I have to make myself remember that I am alive in some way.

—By Katie C., 14, Canada