I met “Tim” one night at the 24-hour gas station at Chapala and West Carrillo streets where unhoused people gather when everything else in Santa Barbara has closed.

He was hard to miss: tall, blond, blue eyes, a warm half-smile that flashed even when he was exhausted or slipping into psychosis.

He hung around the wall in front of Ralphs, across the street, the stage for so many of my outreach encounters.

I had known him 12 weeks when he disappeared.

Outreach workers are not supposed to get attached. We are told to maintain boundaries, avoid “rescuing,” and keep ourselves emotionally safe.

But anyone who works in the fentanyl era will tell you: that is impossible. The work is too intimate, the stakes too high and the people too young.

Tim was only 31.

From the beginning, he was easy to talk to — funny, gentle, quick with a joke.

But the signs were there: the rapid blinking, the sudden intensity, the drifting focus, the whispered conversations with voices only he could hear.

He slept little and used meth to stay alert and fentanyl to quiet the roaring chaos in his head.

This is the triple-challenged population — unhoused, mentally ill, and using substances to self-medicate unbearable psychic pain.

I used every tool I had. Motivational interviewing. Harm reduction. Patience. Humor. The kind of deep listening that takes everything out of you.

But one day, exhausted and scared, I broke script.

I told him plainly, “I’ve lost too many friends to fentanyl. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

He laughed gently, the way so many young men do now.

He believed he “knew how to use it,” that overdoses happened to other people, people who weren’t as careful.

This is the lie fentanyl tells.

•        •        •

Outreach, on paper, looks simple: connect people to services, housing, benefits.

But the reality is different. A man in active psychosis — sleep-deprived, malnourished, traumatized — cannot navigate the bureaucratic maze we call “help.”

When I urged Tim to apply for CalFresh, he nodded but couldn’t do the application interview because he had no phone.

When Santa Barbara County Social Services asked for an address, I told him he could use mine. He couldn’t remember it.

The appointment slipped by. Survival mode always won: hunger and voices and cravings and the immediate need for relief.

People ask why homeless individuals “don’t get help.”

I wish they could see what I see: a young man standing outside a gas station at midnight, exhausted and freezing, talking to the sky and trying to silence an invisible tormentor, while a county worker expects him to complete a 15-page application and answer a phone he doesn’t have.

There was also the street hustle. Tim had no money, so to get five dollars for fentanyl he had to beg, scavenge or run errands for drug dealers.

And here is the impossible moral terrain of outreach work: if he got $5, the rational choice from his perspective was not to take a bus to Social Services. It was to relieve the agony in his head for a few minutes.

One day I gave him $10 for food. The next day I learned he spent it on fentanyl.

I felt something sharp — a flicker of anger, but mostly fear.

Fear that I was funding the chemical that might kill him.

Fear that he was already slipping away.

I kept doing what outreach workers do: finding him clothes, water, cereal, gauging his mental status, reminding him of detox programs, explaining medication-assisted treatment, helping him navigate the revolving jail door.

He’d get arrested on petty drug charges, get released with three days of Suboxone, and then be on his own again with no support.

Each cycle left him thinner, wearier, more frayed around the edges.

Some encounters felt like breakthroughs. He talked about wanting stability. He talked about fear. He talked about wanting to make his mother proud.

These were tiny glimmers, but in this work, glimmers matter.

And then, two weeks ago, he vanished.

•        •        •

When someone unhoused dies of an overdose in this county, their friends rarely find out.

People on the streets use aliases to protect themselves. Few have an ID. Phone numbers change weekly.

And legally, the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s Coroner’s Bureau cannot release information to outreach workers — only to family members, who are often estranged, missing, or themselves overwhelmed by poverty, trauma, addiction or grief.

So when an unhoused person disappears, you are left with the terrible quiet.

You go to the gas station.

You check Ralphs’ wall.

You walk down the block.

You ask around.

No one knows.

Or they know and don’t want to say.

Or they assume he’s in jail.

Or they assume the worst and shrug because they’ve lost too many to mourn loudly anymore.

I have reason to believe Tim died of a fentanyl overdose. I may never know for certain.

I knew him just 12 weeks, but the grief is not proportionate to the duration.

It’s proportionate to the intensity.

To the nights I worried.

To the mornings I searched for him.

To the cereal I poured him.

To the moments he looked at me with a clarity that broke my heart.

It felt, sometimes, like a father-son bond.

The tenderness, the coaching, the frustration, the fear.

And now the ache.

•        •        •

Fentanyl is not just killing people. It is erasing them — fast, quietly, anonymously.

It is destroying the young men of our city before we even learn their stories.

So here is mine with Tim, incomplete as it is, offered so that one more name doesn’t disappear without witness.

I keep thinking of lines from a poem I wrote:

I saw them all —
the perpetrators and the victims, the systems and the souls —
and some nights I went home and could not wash the smell away,
could not stop seeing their faces superimposed on every clean person
walking into Whole Foods.

Some nights I screamed in my car because no one else was screaming.
Some nights I could not tell if I was helping
or just witnessing a genocide in slow motion …

Tomorrow I will go back out again.
Someone else will need water, or socks, or a sandwich, or simply to be seen.
Someone else will be fighting the same demons Tim fought.
And I will show up — heartbroken, hopeful, determined — because that is the work.