That sometimes I awake to angry shouting out my window—strangers, with their words obscured—and lie there scared and hoping it will go away.

That now I double-check the locks, which I never thought about at home.

That three days after I moved in, the apartment below Lenny and Sarah's got broken into. From our house, you can see the sparse windows of their building. On the phone, I told you, Mom, about our yard with its ancient, protective tree, our stucco house and wood moldings, my friends who made it to the barbeque.

That I first met Lenny when he wanted a ride to the pawn shop to pawn his TV. He's 50, with a quick smile and a voice that knows how to be loud. I don’t know how long he’s looked for work.

That a week before I moved here, there was a double homicide two blocks away.

How easy it becomes to continue, as the neighborhood appears to, as if nothing ever happened. I didn’t know them, didn’t see it.

That the other night Sarah knocked on the door at 11:30, hysterical for Lenny, who'd left in the ambulance just before she got home.

That he'd been mugged three blocks away, near where I take the bus.

That, before they took his wallet, they clocked him over the head so that he'd come to the house earlier that evening, stitches lacing his forehead, asking to borrow money to fill a Tylenol 3 prescription. His stitches must have opened up.

How false my sympathy sounded in comparison with her anger. “I just want to leave this neighborhood,” she said over and over. “We've got to leave. I can't take it anymore here.”

The expression on my roommate’s face in answer to her question, “Did he look real bad?” I gave her water like you would have, Mom. She drank but did not calm.

The way she said “I need…” with the whole world hinging on her words. “Please,” she said, “I need ten dollars to buy gauze.” I said the hospital would give him that. She was sure they wouldn’t since they didn’t have insurance. “I'll pay you back,” she said. “I'll leave you my I.D., anything. My job just started yesterday. This is why I don’t work. I should have been home.”

How, before I gave it to her and again after she left, I challenged, I debated the accuracy of her details.

Mom, I'm afraid to ask. What does this say about me?

I do not wake to fire and smoke, the parents and five children rushing out with empty hands. I do not wake when they come knocking, too considerate to ring the bell. They are friendly children, always biking, prying up our compost’s lid to check our its progress into dirt. I wake to sirens, sleep again, the danger nameless and far off until you stir me with a full report. I wish I could awake to need as easily as to your voice. You heard their tapping at the window, made the call. I am also sorry you have not been sleeping, the terrible and unimportant lined up in my mind as I get up ungracefully to pace the dawning street. They have gone to seek another shelter. Firemen nail plywood over windows. When the smoke smell dissipates, who outside this neighborhood will know the cause of this foreclosure? Those crumbled steps that yesterday were a ramp for bikes. We keep a lookout for the family, shovel compost in the garden. I’m away when they return to claim their sagging bags of home. If this is a phoenix story, (family, house, neighborhood) it will take a long time. Please, I am awake now. Let something also beautiful arise.

After visiting the model refugee camp set up in my city, the tents clean with space between them, the park where this was erected not yet stripped of trees for fuel, the lake undrunk, the geese unsuspecting, After listening to the doctor speak of undernourished people and diseases that do not exist here, After an hour imagining myself fled, starving, worrying about my sister, I craved doughnuts, honey, milk. Not long since lunch, but still, I wanted chocolate, grapes, wanted to remember abundance with my body. Why is anybody born how they are born? The park in bloom as I walked through it. A man taking flower pictures, skyline overhead. This warm September sun which is enough and never is enough. I drove home to my kitchen. Placed some of every food I saw, by turn, inside my mouth.