Four stories up

She wasn’t scared anymore. She grew thick, tough skin like a lizard. She used to be picky and fussy. She didn’t like to get dirty.

She lived alone with her tiny cat. Ellie, who when she was bad, she called Eleanor.

She got used to the screams. The screeching tires. Mere annoyances now. The streets filled with garbage, with pushed out couches and soiled mattresses. She wondered where those people were, the ones with their mattresses on the sidewalk. She wondered why there were so many people without families, left to rot and stink and scream themselves to sleep. What happened to their lives. Where was the choice point and where was the cliff?

You don’t realize you’re standing at one of these points until it’s too late. Life plows on. It’s amazing what people can tolerate. How they can continue to go on, living in filth, living with minds that turn against them. Berated by stuck signals of pain, voices that curse them out for breathing, for existing.

What keeps them going? What is their particular joy? Their particular hope? Have they forgotten the world? The world certainly wants to forget them.

What is she watching? My sweet cat. What is she thinking as she stares silently out the screen window four stories up on a busy Oakland street. She stares at the neighborhood grocery across the way, with its mushy over-priced fruit hanging in carts that get pushed out every morning and taken in every night. The Yemini grocer Ali, who might be a tall dwarf but he carries himself like a gangster. He knows everyone in the neighborhood. It’s a good defense against a brutal society. He is married I think. One night I heard him talk about going back to Yemen to get married and I wonder if his wife is still there. I wonder what she thinks of her husband living a western life, listening to rap music and smoking cigarettes.

We’ve been in this apartment for four years now, Ellie and I. Time fucking flies. It flies right by us like a jet overhead that we can barely see.