At 2am, a car door slams.
My dog growls, I wake up.

I hear screaming in the close distance.

I hear trash cans being thrown about, and at first this alarms me but then I realize from which one of the neighbors this noise belongs and I stop worrying. This is becoming habitual. This woman seems to come home after the bars close, depressed and angry once a week these days. She screams, she cries, she bashes up her car, she lashes out. Tonight she said, "and I don't care if I die!" and her partner said, "Okay, great- because you are going to..."

The train whistle blows in the distance.
I think about all the sad people in the world, all the angry, sad people.

I think about a different neighbor on the other side of the block. His name was Ansel. He just passed away recently, and lately I can't walk by his house without crying. The lights in his house are on at night and his curtains are closed and I am wishing that he was still in there and in the morning perhaps the curtains will be open and I will see him reading the paper one more time. He was an older man, his wife long gone. He would come out and say hello, and ask me about my art. I wish I had spent more time talking to him.

"I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due." Caden Cotard from the film Synecdoche, New York.

....