For Rachel: Nighttime

There's an outdoor restaurant right outside my alleyway that has pho, banh mi, and nuoc mia. The same old lady with bleached blonde hair lounges out front in a lawn chair while she roasts shallots on a metal grate set over a charcoal bucket and counts wads of money late into the night.

There is a nightly meeting of shirtless men in the apartment building across the alley from mine. They gather and watch TV in the living room or smoke on the stoop and ignore my stares into their private lives.

Yesterday I began noticing the cicadas. I'm used to tuning out a constant din in the kitchens and my apartment hums with electricity, so there is a fairly high baseline of noise that my brain automatically dismisses, but this was more. I couldn't hear the traffic over their racket. It was like last summer, during the Great Uprising, when you had to shout to be heard over the insect static on the hiking trails.

Maybe I didn't say this before, but everything is built right up on the next, like what you see in movies where everything is cramped with tight alleys. I can smell and hear almost everything happening in the surrounding buildings, which has it's obvious ups and downs. A lot of times this is good because I can listen to Whitney and terribly amusing karaoke while I tap at the internet, but I also have multiple built in early morning alarms. Six thirty coconut guy (riding down the street shouting that he has coconuts), seven o'clock mad dishwasher outside my window - also seven o'clock lady whose wares I cannot discover because her cart is empty, yet she shouts to the rooftops - and then the coconut guy doubles back around in case you missed him. Two buildings down from mine there's some heavy renovation happening, so if I manage to sleep through the rest, a steady hammering is sure to get me. There is a gutted shell and 14 y/o boys are doing the rebuilding (no, but they look so young, even for Asians). There's about eight or ten guys and I see them sitting on a wooden platform at night in a circle around a light and when I leave for work in the morning I can see their sleeping feet hanging over the same platform. They silently stare me down every time I walk by - the first time this happened the old ladies on the street joined in and I was so unnerved that I actually checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten to put on a shirt. Thick greenish brown clouds of pot roll out of that space.