Wake Up!

Two years ago, I was trying to buy a house. I had been evicted from my little moldy apartment in the Oakland hills and instead of renting, I decided I wanted to buy. No, this wasn’t financially responsible on my part. And I couldn’t find a house I could afford that didn’t have iron bars on the windows and gunshot holes in the garage doors. But I lied to myself for a while, and told myself I’d be happy living in an area where I couldn’t step outside after five p.m. While I was looking, I crashed at various friends’ houses. One friend provided me a mobile-home, another the driveway in which to park. I was working midnights then, too, and sleeping in a metal box during the day in mid-summer in Contra-Costa County was miserable. If Alyson used the washing machine while I was sleeping, we’d trip the breaker, and my meager air-conditioning would crap out. I’d wake in a little ball of sweat, too enervated to even walk to house to reset it. There was no working toilet. I crept into Alyson’s house to pee or just tried to hold it (don’t ask about my tupperware experiment).

It was awful not having a place to live. I’m a Cancer, and I don’t really believe all that shite (don’t we all say that?) but home is everything to me. I finally rented an apartment, my sweet little apartment where I’m still happy, gave up the home hunt and started working on paying down the bills instead.

BUT. All this to say that I still had a box and a bag of belongings over in Alyson’s garage. Whenever I visited her, I wouldn’t feel like piling it in my car. She offered to bring it over in her truck, but we never got around to setting it up. While I was sleeping today, J dropped it all off. What’s alarming to me is this: I didn’t hear her unlock and crank open the door. I didn’t hear her dump the stuff in my living room, which must have taken several trips. I didn’t hear her swearing at the Door That Won’t Close, as everyone does. I’m always complaining about not being able to sleep – how was I able to sleep through that? I use earplugs, but I can hear through them – they just muffle the sound a little. I sure as hell heard every note of the Chopin that the ex-Juliard guy upstairs was practicing for an hour (he’s good, but rough on this particular piece). What about a fire? Would I hear the fire alarm? I’m half-tempted to look like a crazy single cat-lady and put up five or six alarms, just in my bedroom. That’d wake me up, right?

It’s a paranoid day, apparently.

This is how Adah sleeps on my feet all day:

And now I’m off to open the box and the bag and figure out what I’ve been happy living without for the last two years. Reason says I should just trash them unopened. But curiosity gets the better of me…..