How did I go from being someone who had a strong distaste for overhearing strangers’ conversations to The Watcher?
I don’t just watch the many neighbors passing by, people who probably don’t realize that I’ve developed a sense of the broad swaths of their lives.
Creatures too. Like, a squirrel. Right this minute. Its prances trace soft arches up the grassy hill, buyant. A leap — leap! — leap! Life without fear.
(CW: Psychologically sensitive subjects ahead)
Rather unlike my experience in the past year, which has thrown me so many challenges that I can’t imagine life without a therapist.
I count the multiple, insane little “events” that’ve marked my Los Angeles apartment with something like doom with a mix of incredulity and lingering outrage:
getting broken into last April. What’s worse, while I was inside my apartment. I shouted at the intruder through a window, horrified. She later reemerged in the front of the building, so out of it that she was beyond reasoning, to ask if she could use my phone. Later, discovered through the LAPD that she was the girlfriend of a former tenant who was a friggin meth dealer and addict. Oh, and she’d been released from prison an hour before the break-in.
I jumped at the rustle of blinds and crack of glass for months after.(I’ve gotta turn all this nonsense into a theatrical play, I think.)
getting gaslit by a former employer through so much psychological abuse.
getting my catalytic converter stolen and going several months with my car driving on a temporary fix.
getting rancid sewage water — I chuckle typing this, having nearly forgotten this happened too — yes, from the bathroom, leaking all over and spending two hours to clean, muttering “Mind over matter” to self as mantra, then cleaning again when the issue returned same day.
Yeah… my life has been a little bumpy in the past year.
As much as I hold space to process the really ridiculous above, I also thank the moments of joy. Vegan donuts. Vegan sushi. Cheating on my vegan diet. Discovering meaning, fitness, shouting at UFC.
The neighbors who pass by, I wonder about their lives. I feel I know so much, yet must be seeing just the tip of the iceberg.
A girl trying on a faded pink hair color from medium brown. Then it’s bleached blonde, which definitely changes her energy.
A breakup. One of the pair no longer walks their small, elderly dog.
The mail carrier, I swear, coming out of someone’s apartment in the early hours of dawn, with a bandana around his head. I wonder why to both counts.
Child labor. A boy carrying a large gardening funnel for leaves on his back, all too skillfully maneuvering around with a rake, a mini version of the man who must be his father working nearby.
A man who always talks way too loud, walking his labrador on the longest leash possible (I’m talking 8-10’), seeming to want everyone to know he’s an important guy who takes phone calls publicly about the entertainment biz.
A woman who stands on the curb to smoke cigarettes first thing in the morning suddenly stops. I don’t see her for a while, and then she re-emerges with a pregnancy belly. A man who must be her partner, donning a bucket hat made from an unmistakably IKEA blue tote bag. A few months later, I notice her belly’s gone. No baby. They move out.
It pained me to think about their loss.
I would like to think that witnessing all these lives, my compassion has grown, providing shade for all the hardened parts.
Sit here a while, my compassion tells me. As refreshing as shade from a tree, any kind.
Listen to life. Breathe. Begin again.