February 01, 2006
Back in Brookland
Returning to Brookland was less comfortable than I had thought. Disabusing oneself of the comforts of the Queen is not an easy task. But after a while my old abode did not seem such a strange place and I found my old thoughts returning to me.
The other night I heard a commotion outside my window. Trying to sleep I Ignored it until it reached the decibel level of a crime, at which point I popped up and looked out the window. Nothing of note, a group of ramblers boisterously chastising a friend for an unfaithful wife. They hunkered on. I lay back down, felt the cold Brookland air flow in my open window. "Wow, we haven't had a shooting in a while. That's nice. Must be the winter, less midnight antics when it's cold out." I thought, pleased.
I slept fitfully, feeling the pains of the royal absence more acutely than normal that night. The next day my roommate, formerly of Digital Influence, informed me that I was wrong. There was a shooting. Half a block from my house, a teenage girl, two shots in the back of the head.
It is oddly comforting to feel awful reporting these facts, to know that the frequency of the shootings has not resulted in callousness of any sort. But that is little consolation.
I heard nothing more of the shooting, but on the way to the store the other day I passed a memorial of unmistakable meaning, Bottles of liquor, notably Hennessy, stuffed animals and the like. The memorial for the shooting I witnessed faded, the stuffed animals grown dingy and dirty the bottles of liquor collected a film of dirt and without my notice, it disappeared. No doubt this girls' memorial will similarly fade and disappear.
We have, for almost six months now had a new roommate. Mysterio, in the parlance of Digital Influence, moved out without a word. In fact, our landlord knew before any of us did. In his place a friend of mine from the restaurant came, intelligent, hapless and struggling, a clone of me! He is some years younger so it's more forgivable in his case. We worked together one night last week and he left about half an hour before me. That night I came home to police cars and fire engines. My metro walk is a six block straight shot so I saw them long before I got to my house, I knew, though, that they were in front of my house. I stared at the wily thing on the grill of a fire engine, dazed, tired, and pensive. It occurred to me that the victim of this shooting might be my friend, the oddest thin in retrospect is that I had never before worried about this. From my window where I saw the shooting last summer I was an observer, not a participant and I suppose I never felt that anyone I knew would be.
As I approached the police cars exited and the fire engine performs an awkward u-turn and left. There wasn't a trace on the street. Maybe it was a false alarm, I didn’t know. When I got in the house, exhausted, I came downstairs to see if B, my roommate, was home. Before I finished the steps, I smelled his characteristic incense. He burns it whenever he's home. I turned around and went upstairs to my bed.
Posted by conryf at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)