The hardest thing is just being here. I want stories, dammit. I want conflicts that arise, and are then resolved one way or another. I want to know how things come out in the end. Instead, I get a cat on the third floor, loud conversations on the bus, kids running around screaming on the street at 10:00 at night, and my neighbor’s bad back. Everything makes a good story, but only in retrospect.

The back yard cat is, yes, still on the third floor. The vet took her blood, but I won’t know until Monday whether she is going to live or die. She doesn’t care either way, but I do. What’s the story? I don’t know. It’s either a sad little story about a rescued cat, or an origin story about a family cat.

I took the bus yesterday to have lunch at IKEA and pick up a couple of terrarium plants at Lowe’s. Later I took the bus to Center City for shirts. On the bus down, and on the bus back, people were talking loudly with one another, but not to me. I will never see any of them again, and nothing notable happened, but my adult kid texted me later on to say two women were fist fighting on their bus, and my kid de-escalated the fight, because of course they did. I will know more later, but I had no fist fights. No stories. Not today.

The tweens live on the dead-end streets around the corner either side of me; they ride their scooters, bounce their basketballs, and scream. It’s like living on an elementary school playground. Sometimes they get the urge to do something really stupid, and they cause damage, but only on my street because their parents would kill them if they saw them. Nothing happened last night. I am waiting for them to grow up and start hanging out somewhere else completely, but meanwhile I have a camera out front so I know who is picking my flowers or kicking my stoop. Last night, one of them was riding his scooter in the intersection, around and around in a circle, talking on a phone. The woman on that block who used to keep the kids in line died this year. They are fine with me when they see me, but children are capable of causing remorseless damage when unsupervised because their brains aren’t fixed yet. We will see if the tweens make it out of childhood. Some don’t, around here.

My neighbor is in his fifties, and life is catching up with him after years of jiu-jitsu; he has some compressed disks in his back, and is limping. We stand and talk about our back and leg problems. He, like me, has a backstory of addiction and alcoholism, so we are very candid about our relationship with pain. I don’t know how it comes out. I hope he does okay. We watch out for one another.

Meanwhile, I read novels and anticipate upcoming movies, and I try not to think about how the story ends.