My card declines at the grocery store for the third time and my stomach turns. I have enough, I’m sure of it. There’s no service in the store for me to check my app, and there’s a line of people behind me at the self-checkout. I’d hoped to avoid these kinds of looks when I chose not to use a register, but it’s not my lucky day, and it’s definitely not payday.

I’m a 21-year-old living in a single person household living right here in Washtenaw County. I work full-time at a national retailer and write part time for the Sun Times News. Unmarried, no kids, working full-time, and on food stamps.

I pull out my bank card next, knowing I mailed my rent check two days ago and my landlord might not have cashed it yet. Maybe there’s enough for now to at least cover my week’s worth of groceries, which barely fill two bags, and I can text my landlord asking for an extension on the rent.

I grabbed apples this trip, hoping to keep healthy, but fresh fruit is light on the stomach and hard on the wallet. The bag is seven dollars heavy, nearly a dollar an apple. I consider if that’s what has to get left behind this trip until my debit card finally goes through. I grab my bags and hurry outside past the watchful eye of the teenager sitting at the self-checkout’s central computer. I’ve worked her job. I know she got an alert as soon as my first card failed to go through, and she had been waiting to see if I was desperate enough to use a five-finger discount on a can of soup.

I step outside into the sun and cover the screen of my phone, trying to see past the light why my Electronic Benefit Transfer card didn’t work. They give me $139 a month—surely enough to cover myself and the sparse groceries I need. It’s only September 13th.

$5.49 is what I have left to get me through the next two weeks.

I work at one of the biggest retail stores in the country. Forty hours a week, 41 if I’m crafty enough to not be noticed by my bosses pulling the allotted ten minutes overtime I aim for every day, and at $15 an hour. I’m so well-off I had my Medicaid pulled out from under me; I make $150 too much a month to get dentist appointments and cancer screenings. I’m making what everyone in my job wanted to be making ten years ago, before inflation made it an unliving wage.

I love working with people, but customer service doesn’t pay, and the 50¢ an hour raise I made by taking a manual labor job in the back of the store was necessary when I moved out on my own. My rent is half my monthly wages. I know the old advice is to not get a place that’s more than a third of what you make a month. But how? These are different times. There’s a housing crisis. And an inflation problem. And now groceries have become a national political issue. And I’m stuck in the middle of it. A lot of others are too. It’s not a problem about people who are away somewhere else. It’s right here in the third richest county in Michigan.

A friend of mine texts me to tell me about Kamala Harris friendship bracelets that are selling for $20 a piece. I turn on my phone to get a respite from thinking about my credit card bill this month, and Trump declares there’s an inflation issue but that it all falls on the other side’s shoulders. 

I go to update my car’s title at the Secretary of State the next day, and a TV on the wall behind the glass-paneled counter is giving me advice on how to penny-pinch when buying groceries. $34.75 a week, and if I buy a carton of eggs I’ve wasted a fifth of it. I buy damaged goods and the nearly-expired sales and I haven’t eaten out since I moved out on my own. I don’t know how many more pennies I have to pinch at this point. The middle class isn’t dying like some passively rotting corpse—we’re being killed.

When we say time is money, we fail to account for the fact that money is time. We don’t all have the same number of hours in a day. My hours are spent driving to work—hours saved by someone working virtually or with flexible hours. My hours are spent cooking from scratch—an oftentimes healthier option, but far more time consuming and difficult to balance with the daily nine hours spent at my job. My hours were spent doing schoolwork to get a degree for a better paying job, up until the $14,000 a year it took to get an Associate’s became too much. I can’t get rich because I’m too busy struggling to stay poor. And with that time now spent with no way to get it back, how is the average person supposed to get by? Nine hours at work, a total drive time of an hour a day when traffic is good, another two hours throughout the day cooking food we can’t afford, and a decent night’s sleep, and all we’re left with is four hours a day to make a life for ourselves, and one worth living at that. How do I manage it?

How did we get here?

We throw around phrases like “the disappearing middle class” without taking the time to consider what it means. The poverty gap is increasing at an unreasonable rate with no end in sight, and a single-person household needs two jobs to survive. We’ve lost sight of what past generations took for granted, most of us dreaming of a decent apartment with in-unit laundry instead of a house in the suburbs. Groceries becoming unaffordable is only a symptom of the greater issue: how can one person sustain themselves anymore in America? 

I hope my questions can become our questions.