My window is a port-hole in the morning and the evening

From time to time, strange things happen outside of Pinky. For several days in a row a few weeks ago a neighbor named Charlene sat on her porch beginning at 10 p.m. or so, barking out orders at her teenage son who, in response, ran laps and did jumping jacks in the median in front of our houses. Turns out he was being punished for something--for "f---ing" with his mother, which Charlene makes sure the whole neighborhood knows is just not something people do. We hear Charlene's voice through our walls.

But we have all the windows open these days to let the autumn in. Sounds and air from the two streets below drift up to us, making Pinky feel like a treehouse. In the mornings I lay in bed before fully waking up, listening to the gentle noises of the day beginning. One morning at 4:30 I became aware of someone retching just below my window. I got up and saw a neighbor regurgitating his unhappy loneliness in the alleyway. Today, at one or two in the morning, boys with raucous voices pulled into the parking lot behind our house and the three Section 8 houses next to us. They were playing loud rap music, slamming doors, cursing to each other. I thought, "I wonder why they think it's okay to be so loud at 1 a.m.?" and slipped back to sleep. All these nighttime adventures in Augusta seem sort of like bad dreams to me. And still, my window stays open.

You'd think it could offer salvation of some kind should the need arise. Megan Mullis is my Rapunzel sometimes, peeking over the balcony at me when I call to her to throw down--not her long golden hair--but the keys to the house. In these situations, of course, I am the one looking to be saved, not Rapunzel, and I seek salvation from my own absence of mind.

Another one of these strange circumstances unfolded before us Monday night. Though I write the word "us," I really mean "me," and though I am really very fiercely surrounded by love here in Augusta, I felt like the only one bearing the burden of my sins then. I'd come home at midnight from Kinkos, where I'd gotten some school newsletters printed for the next morning. So the first problem of the night is the major Trouble with my life: starting with T, it rhymes with P and stands for Procrastination.

I'd printed only about a third of the number I needed and already they had cost about twice what I wanted to spend. The next morning, I knew, I'd have to go try to print the rest at a cheaper rate before going into school to pass the newsletters out. It was too much to do and way too late to do it, and on a budget that is much too not-for-profit. I was feeling defeated, and it was only midnight. To brighten the evening a little, I'd called a friend to talk to on the ride home. Hearing his voice apparently overloaded my synapses and made me forget to take my keys out of the car, so that when I got to my front door with my arms full of prints and cell phones, I found I had no way of getting in.

I had no idea what defeat was.

Even the crickets had stopped creaking weeks earlier in honor of fall. The wind moaned through the trees like a lonely spirit. Every now and then a group of hunched shapes came walking down the sidewalk. I tried not to imagine what they thought of the young white girl in pajama shorts looking lost and peering into a car with her cell phone.

Standing back to consider my options, I realized I really didn't have any. Ellen and Adam weren't answering their phone, and Roommate Rapunzel turns hers off at night and sleeps with a box fan the decibel level of a train. Ringing the doorbell would either be fruitless or malicious, I decided, since she began her first day of internal medicine rotations the next morning. Trying to break into my truck would look highly suspicious to anyone driving by, as would trying to scale the front of Pinky to break into the house through the balcony.

Surprisingly, the door to the back stairwell was unlocked. I checked for crouching burglars under the steps and beside the washing machine. Then I climbed to our back door, which was locked (we're so gratingly responsible sometimes), found a wool rug from Turkmenistan to cover myself and a collapsible cooler to pillow my head, and I fell right asleep. Actually, I had trouble sleeping. I kept thinking about roaches and roving bands of boys. But then I thought, "I'm just learning how to be homeless in case I ever need it," and that calmed me down a little.

The next morning at six, Adam rescued me with a spare key, and I got a good hour of rest. The newsletters had been printed wrong, so they would have been late regardless, and then there was hot black tea to reconcile myself to the morning. This time, Augusta proved herself kind to me in my night as a stowaway.

I tell you, I am like a newborn child in this world of after-school. With my fifteen-month old niece, who lives across the street, I watch and listen and I learn. I'm enraptured by some things and I miss most of everything else. And the neighborhood and the world roll on, dawn into dusk.