AT THE STOA

I am not given to envy - because that requires higher-order emotions I have not been capable of for a while - but I find myself somehow envying the tenant next door. He's been singing his heart out in front of God and everybody for four hours. I doubt if he even knew that it had been four hours. The building we live at - this tenant and I, along with several others -  has architecture that, if I am being kind, can only be described as "modern, if by 'modern' you mean something imagined by a blind person who happened to overhear a conversation about architecture several tables away." No offense to the blind. This building is a box. Not an aesthetic box, just a box. The walls have some sort of sound-proofing, but if anyone held a conversation higher than 0.2 decibels in the hallways it would be transmitted at ten within your ears seven units away. I have had a security guard knock on my door at 1:00 in the morning because I had my best friend and her boyfriend at

It's the little things that save us from the abyss. A memory, a smile or a moment of honesty and humanity in an interview that seems to be going bad, a deep breath in precisely the moment when you can't, a thought that sustains us against how life, like a bad wife, batters us. I remember my nephew when he was small. My sister had to go somewhere that day, and so she rose at dawn and asked me to lay down beside him so he wouldn't be alarmed when he woke up. I did. He was. Though it was still too dark out to see, upon waking he took a look at my face, watching him with a small smile, watching this little human being that took a C-section after 10+ hours of my sister's labor, and he wailed and wailed and wailed. I wasn't his mother. I didn't smell like her, nor look like her, nor wasn't her. I tried calming him down, practicing the hold I finally had the guts to do at the hospital when he was born - 6 hours after he was born - I was so afraid to touch