I was twenty-four years old and carrying enough wreckage of my own to fill a room, yet suddenly I was surrounded by men whose lives contained whole worlds I had never imagined. Some were twice my age. Some had children they hadn't seen in years. Some had once owned houses, managed businesses, served in the military, worked trades or raised families. Others had been moving between institutions, shelters, couches, jails and streets for so long that stability had become something they remembered more easily than something they could imagine reaching again. Living among them began changing the way I looked at people because I could finally see how much history disappears when someone's entire identity gets reduced to his present circumstances.

There were also some unbelievable characters in that building. I could probably write an entire series about the men I met at Lighthouse, and someday I may. Some were hilarious. Some were exhausting. Some could turn a cigarette break into a forty-minute monologue, and others carried themselves like mayors of an invisible city, somehow knowing everybody, every rule, every shortcut and every piece of gossip before breakfast was over. Friendships formed quickly because we were living on top of one another. So did arguments and alliances. There were men you learned to trust, men you learned to watch and men whose stories became a little more impossible every time they told them.

At night, whatever identities we had carried through the rest of our lives came back through the same doors. A businessman could sleep twenty feet from an addict. A veteran could stand in the same meal line as a kid who had spent most of his adult life getting high. Someone with a college education could share a bathroom with someone who could barely read. Somewhere among all of them was me, trying to figure out who Andrew Barrett was going to become when so much of what had previously defined my life had fallen away.

I had almost nobody then. My relationships with family were shattered or distant, and I didn't have a meaningful circle of friends waiting somewhere else in Indianapolis. There was no house I could drive back to on Sunday afternoon, no familiar bedroom preserved for me and no dependable safety net waiting underneath me. My life had been stripped down until most of what remained could fit into a duffel bag and backpack. That reality could be frightening, especially at night when I thought too long about what would happen if the Mission stopped being available to me.

During the day, though, the emptiness in my life created a kind of freedom I had rarely experienced. Nobody needed to know where I was going when I walked out the doors in the morning. Nobody was waiting for an explanation when I returned. I could walk for miles or sit beside the canal for hours with my notebook. I could drift toward IUPUI and spend time around people approximately my age. I could put on my headphones and let Indianapolis become the soundtrack to itself. For most of my earlier life, so much of my attention had been consumed by other people: wanting something from them, disappointing them, fighting with them, hiding from them, trying to impress them or desperately wanting them to see me differently. During that summer, there were long stretches when nobody was watching me at all. I began discovering what I did when the audience disappeared.

I walked. I listened. I wrote. I took pictures. I sat still long enough to notice things. The city became familiar through repetition, until streets that had once belonged to strangers started carrying my own memories. Certain benches became places where I wrote. Certain corners reminded me of conversations. The Circle, the canal, White River State Park and the streets around IUPUI slowly became coordinates in a private map I was drawing inside myself. I had no idea that twenty years later I would be sitting here trying to reconstruct that young man's world and wishing I could reach backward through time to ask him questions.

More than anything, I wish I still had his notebooks. I want to know what I wrote while sitting beside the canal. I want to know what frightened me, what I believed would happen next and which men from Lighthouse I thought I would remember forever. Writing has followed me through so many versions of my life that I wonder now whether I was already doing then what I am doing with Prism of a Life today: trying to capture enough of a moment that some part of it might survive me moving on from it.

There is a photograph in my memory that no camera ever took. I am twenty-four years old, walking through downtown Indianapolis with a backpack on my shoulders and headphones over my ears. Cigarettes are in one pocket and my Zippo is in the other. There might be twenty dollars in my wallet. I have nowhere of my own to sleep that night, and when evening comes I will walk back toward Lighthouse Mission, pass through the doors and climb into a bunk surrounded by dozens of other men.

I remember feeling alive.

I can say that now without turning homelessness into something beautiful. The Mission was crowded. Living there could be exhausting. I had almost no money and very little security. I was living inside circumstances that could become dangerous quickly, and there were consequences waiting farther down the road that I couldn't yet see. Still, I remain grateful for parts of that summer. I am grateful for the miles I walked, for the notebook I carried, for the photographs I took and especially for the men whose lives briefly intersected mine.

They taught me how easily a person's worst season can swallow everything that came before it. Once someone becomes "the homeless guy," the rest of his biography can disappear from view. The men around me were fathers, husbands, sons, veterans, laborers, managers, addicts, victims, criminals, friends, believers, liars and survivors, often carrying several of those identities at once. Their lives were messy and contradictory because human lives are messy and contradictory. The longer I stayed at Lighthouse, the harder it became to believe that a single word could tell me very much about the man sleeping in the bunk beside me.

My own life should have made that obvious. The twenty-four-year-old walking around Indianapolis in the summer of 2006 carried things nobody passing me on the sidewalk could have known. Addiction was already part of my history. Mental illness was moving through my life without a name. I carried anger, shame, loneliness, impulsiveness and an enormous hunger to belong somewhere. I was also curious about the world. I could be tender. I loved music deeply. I paid attention to people. Somewhere inside that backpack was a notebook belonging to a writer who hadn't yet figured out what writing might eventually mean to him.

By late summer, I had begun imagining what would come next. I understood that I couldn't spend my life walking from Lighthouse Mission to Monument Circle and back again. I needed work, stability and some kind of future. For a while, I began building one. The months that followed would eventually carry me into some of the darkest territory of my twenties. Crack cocaine would enter the story. There would be violence, an assault and a situation involving someone in leadership at Lighthouse that I understand very differently at forty-five than I did at twenty-four. Eventually I would be kicked out. Years later, I would return to Lighthouse Mission again and enter its year-long recovery program.

Those stories deserve room of their own, because reducing them to a few dramatic paragraphs here would flatten another complicated chapter of my life. This story belongs to the summer before all of that, when I could still walk out the Mission doors each morning and see an entire city waiting for me. It belongs to the men sleeping a few feet away, each carrying a history too large to fit on a bunk. It belongs to grainy photographs, an old Motorola RAZR, headphones, cigarettes, a Zippo, a backpack and notebooks I desperately wish had survived.

Twenty years later, I understand why I keep returning to those months. I possessed almost nothing, and nearly everything important to me could fit inside the bags I carried. Indianapolis gave me miles of room to wander while I was trying to understand what came next. Lighthouse gave me a temporary place to return to and introduced me to people whose stories permanently complicated the way I see homelessness, failure and the long series of events that can bring a human being to the edge of his life.

Block by block, I learned Indianapolis.
Man by man, I learned something about people.
Mile by mile, I was beginning to learn myself.

Of course, this was before the betrayal. Before the assault on the man who would hold me captive. Before Lighthouse would throw me out onto the streets. Before I would eventually walk back through those same doors and begin changing the trajectory of my life.

But all of that was still waiting for me on the other side of summer.

VIEW THE COMPLETE SUMMER 2006 PHOTO COLLECTION