It was a mild day, not raining, so I ventured out of my glass-and-concrete apartment building in Yaletown for a walk through the Downtown Eastside. A walk would put me in the mood—set the scene, so to speak—for the roundtable discussion I was scheduled to lead with two other writers at the Carnegie Centre that afternoon.

It had been years since I’d walked through this area, though of course I’d passed by on transit or in a car, peering like a tourist at the grey stream of misery around Main and Hastings, tamping down whatever emotion rose before it had an opportunity to overwhelm. It was so long ago, my time here, another life. Now I was the odd figure in the landscape, the one that didn’t fit, among the prostitutes with their twisted faces stitching a jagged path down the sidewalk, the groups of dealers huddled in rank doorways. Perhaps I looked innocent, unblemished—no one offered to sell me drugs.

But the landmarks of my former life were still here, with their residues of memory. The Army & Navy, where I sought refuge as a runaway, parting with a fistful of change for a hot dog or a soft-serve ice cream cone, eating it squatting in the fetid alley, the backpack that housed my most precious possession—reams of scrawled paper that would metamorphose into my first book—always within reach. A store called Model Express, where I bought my hooker clothes: cheap stretchy outfits in shiny gold and silver or hot pink, clothes that flashed and sparkled on the street corner. All the nights of degradation jumbled in my subconscious, inseparable from one another: crouched in the front seat of yet another car parked in an alley or by the docks, the fumbling of flesh under the sodium lights, the thundering of my pulse and the bite of bile in my throat.

It wasn’t until I passed a pawnshop that sadness slammed into me. The years peeled away and I was 14 again, it was Expo 86, and an essay I had written had won a contest in which the prize was a camera. I had immediately taken the camera to that pawnshop, where the man at the counter squinted at me suspiciously and asked for confirmation that I was of legal age, which I gave by lying and signing a document, and then he handed over”¦ What? Twenty, 30 dollars? He already had too many cameras, he said, but sniffed my desperation, seeing before him an awkward adolescent in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and an earring in the shape of a peace symbol, clutching a backpack that doubled as a pillow, trying to pretend that she was old enough for this life.

The yearning I felt now for that squandered prize! That chunky camera with its liquid lens, boxy and marvellous in my hands, abandoned to the grimy window of the pawnshop. Was that why I had never allowed myself to purchase a camera in all the years that followed? Why I could never look at the gleaming cases of photography equipment in drugstores without thinking of my precious writing prize, which I had had to sell for a fraction of its worth?

It was ridiculous, the sadness, the maudlin self-pitying. I had work to do at the SFU–sponsored event, where writers would give advice on publishing to residents of the Downtown Eastside. There was the Carnegie Centre, on the crest of the hill, swarming with people. I was early, had walked faster than I had planned. “Hey, beautiful,” a man called as I wriggled my way through the mass of loiterers on the corner, and I stifled a smile. This was a welcome change. In Yaletown, the yoga-toned passersby stared down their noses at me for not wearing the right clothes or carrying a designer handbag. Then a distant, automatic response leapt up: how much would he be willing to pay for a few minutes of my time? Somewhere along that walk, it was as if the present had fused with the past, as if in hurrying along Hastings Street, I had walked into the shadow of my former self.

I shook it off and went into the centre. More memories here: this was where I had come to turn hundreds of scribbled pages into neatly typewritten manuscripts that I sent off to literary magazines and contests. Had this place been such a hub of activity 20 years ago? I remembered the solitude of the typewriter room, how I was often the only person there, my fingers flying across the keyboard in a satisfying clatter. Now, in the lobby, a crowd swirled around me. A Native man hawked his cards and carvings; Chinese pensioners huddled over their mahjong tiles and foreign-language newspapers; women with canes made their heart-stopping progress down the warped marble stairs.

The volunteer for the Writers’ Jamboree beckoned me over to join the other panellists, but I could hardly focus on their faces, their mobile mouths; everything seemed at a remove. Who was I? Where did I fit? I owned a condo in trendy Yaletown, was a published author of nine books of poetry and prose. This was true. It was also true that my suite overlooked the alley where stoned youth staggered to squabble and shoot up, true, too, that I earned poverty wages from sporadic freelance work, and sometimes lay awake at night worrying about being homeless again. Once in a while, I found myself peering into doorways and considering which coats and comforters would best keep out the cold. But now I found the press of other people overwhelming; the noise and bustle of public spaces sent me scurrying back to my lair. The accidental brush of a stranger’s body in a crowd would spark a frantic rage that I wasn’t always successful in smothering. How would I handle life on the streets if it came to that again?

The hour of the workshop passed in a blur. For the first time ever, I had forgotten my notes—reaching into my purse minutes before the session began, my fingers grasped at air. Fortunately, we weren’t expected to speak at length, and the round-table participants were a lively bunch. The applause that greeted each of the writers was deafening, a touching show of support and acceptance from the people who had received none growing up. It was a reminder of what had drawn me to this area, the relief of being in a place where no one was in a position to judge anyone else. This was a seductive lure, and I felt the tug of it again, sitting there around the dirty table while hands reached hungrily and unabashedly for stacks of cookies from the platter of refreshments.

An older woman at the workshop fixed me in her kind gaze and said she had appreciated my writing set in the Downtown Eastside but had been surprised when she’d come across an essay of mine describing quite a different neighbourhood, Yaletown. “It was still good, but it was so”¦ different. I wonder, has having some success as a writer changed your material?”

I mumbled something about how as we get older and accumulate a variety of experiences, they influence and expand our work, but perhaps she felt I had turned away from this place, set out for greener pastures without looking back. Well, what was the result of looking back? A kind of swirling pain, a mounting wave of panic that had to be swallowed and anesthetized. It wasn’t a good idea to look back, not even at the bright moments, the displays of compassion or generosity that sprang forth every day: the man who picked you up hitchhiking and didn’t try to grope you in exchange for the free ride, the woman who gave you a bag of doughnuts because you reminded her of her daughter. I really didn’t want to remember any of it. I took the bus back west, back to the land of Lululemon and purse-sized dogs, back to my condo where I looked out at the alley and fought for breath.

Evelyn Lau is a Vancouver writer and poet whose most recent book is Treble (Raincoast, 2005).