Fences

[WhiskeyChick]

Today is the first day of many that my next door neighbor will wake up and have to realize that her husband is gone. Today she will have to feel his cold, empty side of the bed and know that it will remain that way. She will have to re-learn how to live alone, eat alone, work alone, and sleep alone. She will have to re-think her home, bills, future, and entire life from this new perspective.

I didn't really know the woman... actually mocked her at times for her "saucer" lifestyle of seeming drunk and drugged all day long and walking around outside with her skirt tucked into her underwear. But for some reason watching the paramedics wheel her husband out to the ambulance, taking their time and not bothering with the sirens, has shaken me and left me near tears. Today I'm hurting for her.

I can't go down the thought path of "what would I do if..." Even an attempt to admit that I may have to face that someday is completely crippling. I don't even know why I'm writing about it other than to acknowledge the fact that one fence separates a life so amazing that I never could have dreamed of, and the greatest tragedy a woman can possibly experience.

[Buckshot George]

Neighbors in Arizona... You never really know who the hell exactly lives on the other side of the concrete fence (or the privacy that Hotwheels built out of old barn wood in a part of the country where they are no barns...) You hear the voices sometimes, you the roar of their home entertainment systems which are mostly the sounds of bullets, explosions, derailing and men who say things like "Go ahead, make my asshole." I forced them all to smell my charcoal grill (and sometimes hickory smoke). Then I hear the neighbor behind us slapping the shit out of his girlfriend while she screams "NO! I DIDN'T DO IT!" right before the cops arrest him. Then there was the police standoff across the street between Phoenix PD and the paranoid meth guy who doesn't have a single window in his house that hasn't been smashed out. I never brought any of these fuckers a fruitcake when I moved. I think one of our neighbors is Vaughan and he is a born again Christian but I pissed him off when I was drunk and shooting bb guns in the backyard one night and he doesn't like me anymore so we don't say things like "Hey, have a good day" to each other anymore. The neighbors. Yup.