After knowing a guy for just a few weeks, TikToker @kyrstelou took out a loan to buy a van for them to live in when he became homeless.
Within only one week of hanging out with him, she was already in love. That was when he got kicked out of his apartment and lost his job. It was the middle of winter in Seattle, and she felt responsible for his entire well-being.
She slept in her car with him and woke up every 30 minutes to turn on the heat and make sure they didn’t freeze to death while he slept soundly. After about a week, she got really sick of that. She was trying hard to keep her job, but she was constantly falling asleep at work.
For two weeks, she tried zipping him up in a sleeping bag, putting him in the trunk of her car, and parking in front of her parents’ house, but that wasn’t sustainable, so she decided to take out a $10,000 loan and use $2,000 in savings to buy a van. She drove three and a half hours to Wyoming to pick up the van.
When she got there, the van was not what she had expected. It didn’t look much like the pictures, but she was too naive and inexperienced to tell the sellers no.
So, she proceeded to take a nap in the van before driving her car back home. He drove the van. He was speeding, and she wanted to tell him to slow down, but she had no way of contacting him because he had broken his phone the day before.
Then, she noticed that he wasn’t anywhere near her on the road. She pulled over and waited, thinking that if she didn’t see him in the next couple of minutes, something bad must have happened.
He ended up calling her from someone else’s phone and told her that something was wrong with the van. He was able to hitch a ride over to her, and then they drove back to the van together in her car.
The van wasn’t starting, so she tried waving people down for help. However, no one seemed to know what was wrong with it. Hours later, they decided to inch the van back to Salt Lake City.
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She slowly drove behind the van with her hazard lights on while he pushed the van forward.
Suddenly, a huge puff of smoke wafted out of the van, and she realized that the engine must have exploded. It was late at night, so they had to sleep in her car next to a gas station in the freezing cold.
The next morning, she started calling U-Haul companies. They picked up a moving truck 15 minutes away and planned to pick up a trailer that was two hours away.
They missed their exit, and their gas tank was drained, so they weren’t going to be on time to pick up the trailer. She called the lady with the trailer and begged her to stay later, but she couldn’t.
So now, they had to get a hotel room and pick up the trailer the next day. After getting the trailer, they spent a long time trying to hook it up to the van.
“I’m relying on this man, that in retrospect, I barely knew, but I thought that was my soul mate,” said @kyrstelou. “So, I thought he was capable, and he was my hero. He could do everything.”
He ended up badly injuring his toe, and they had to go to the hospital. She waited at the hospital for 12 hours while the doctor performed surgery on his toe. He also could not drive because of the medications he was given.
She had to call her brother and dad and begged them for help. After four days, they finally made it back home. Her boyfriend couldn’t get a job because of his toe injury.
“It’s three years later, almost,” she said. “The van is still in front of my parents’ house. It’s broken, and it literally can’t do anything. I’ve never even driven it, and I spent my life’s savings on it.”
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
