“I’ll take care of it,” he held his phone up close to his mouth and whispered angrily.

It was a sunny day in Hudson, Ohio. The window in front of the church near Main reflected waves of rainbows. Red, yellow, orange, green, blue, purp – no, indigo.

He paced from the top of the stairs to the bottom, fidgeting his left hand while occasionally pushing his glasses up with his index finger.

After a solid minute of walking up and down, talking, sighing, grunting, holding his already-busy left hand into a fist and squeezing it like crushing an apple, he hung up the phone.

He walked fast to his Jeep Wrangler parked in the back of the church and rushed to his small, threadbare house in the middle of northeast Ohio.

“Michael! Quick, help me out!” a woman yelled at the sound of a car pulling into the driveway.

“Coming,” he muttered to himself.

Pulling his keys out of his pocket, he unlocked the door and the second door. He threw his keys and his blazer onto the couch and walked into the bedroom where the woman’s voice was coming from.

“Hey,” he said in a deep, lowered voice.

The woman turned around, “you?”

“Who are y—-”

"How am I supposed to learn all these things I want to learn if I can't afford to feed myself?"

There are so many things about this that are messed up and sad, and it's the reality for so many people around the world. I don't understand why some people can act without consideration for others; so many people are suffering.

She is a street artist.

103 is her home, but she spends more time at work.

She considers art her job.

She rents a small windowless room in Brooklyn.

She creates and sells her art there,

She daydreams about painting the best murals there.

She is at the bottom of the artist food chain.

She has no art degree — school was too expensive.

She has no connections — no fancy collectives to follow.

She has no concept of time - over two minutes, and the cops arrive.

All she has is her art.

All she needs is her art.

She thinks she is a real street artist. No tarnish —

Real paint.

“You stole sh*t from my mother’s house, this relationship is over,” he called his friend.

He is a young man living in apartment 102 who discovered two hours ago that his mother’s house was broken into by his friend. Her jewelry went missing, as well as 1000 dollars tucked away in her safe. The 1000 dollars were kept in case of medical emergencies.

“I don’t wanna hear you talk abt it.”

“I WAS HIGH.”

“Next time you approach my family, I’m calling the cops.”

“* ”

Hw hung up the phone.

He buried his head into his hands, not knowing why his friend, now ex-friend, would steal from his mother. His friend had a proper job and always dressed decently. The cigarettes he smoked were even the nice white people type of stuff.

“Why is this happening to me?” he thought to himself.

Adulthood hasn’t been treating him well; he wishes he could return to living at his mama’s house.

He started to dial 9-1-7 5-4-2-6… Then, he stopped, turned away, and slammed his phone onto the stupid sidewalk.

Apartment 101

In the apartment lives a middle-aged woman who loves to write. She has been a tenant at the building for as long as she and I can remember.

Sitting at her dining table, tightly squeezed into her small and cluttered kitchen, she described to me the benefits of keeping a neatly organized diary.

When she was a child, she used to have an old notebook with torn pages that she would often scribble in with her fluctuating but occasionally decent handwriting. She wrote about school, love, family, and dreams.

Ever since she grew up and traveled to college, she has lost her diary.

I think she’s still sad even until this day. Frankly, she put so much time and effort into that small book. She doesn’t deserve the pain associated with lost memory.

Today, an incredibly brilliant young man asked me what childhood is.

I couldn’t provide an adequate answer on the spot, but after some thought, I think childhood refers to the ages before realizing that life has so much more to offer than love. There’s pain in life, there’s suffering.

There are people who are barely able to put food on the tables and pay rent.
There are people working from sunrise to sunset, earning so little money that it is almost illegal.

I have just now realized,

Documenting childhood is so important because living with pain is inherently miserable, and childhood provides a bandaid to the wound, some sugar in that bitter and awful-tasting coffee called real life.

This realization may have come too late,

Or maybe not – we’ll see