walk away now and you're gonna start a war

i had to close the window because the air coming in smelled faintly of burning insulation.  now i will sleep poorly, as i do when i don’t have any fresh air coming in during the night.

i hope it wasn’t a big fire.

back in law school, one time i looked out my window and saw a house on fire.  it was in the next neighborhood over.  it was a huge plume of smoke and a lot of sirens and flashing lights.  the next day i saw it on the news.  thankfully nobody had died.

one night we heard gunshots, a lot of them, so many it sounded like fireworks.  and this was in a small city/big town, with very little violent crime.  i checked the papers and the tv news for several days afterwards, but never found out what had happened.  i figured that meant no one had been killed.

that was one good thing about living in a converted warehouse with no insulation between the floors: that night i was picking up my phone to call the police and report the gunfire when i heard my upstairs neighbor already on the phone with them.  he sounded scared.  knowing that he was scared too made me feel a lot calmer somehow.

i’m so lucky that hearing gunshots is a remarkable event for me.