Sharing Walls

Outside of the North wall of my apartment sits the air conditioning unit.  I know as much about air conditioning units as I do about cars as I do about bums, or the Homeless, or 'Neighbors' as some charitable people would rather call them as they gentrify the areas that the former previously inhabited.

Today I finished exorcising the past from my bedroom - new coat of paint, new bed, new layout simplified from all that past which needed purging, but outside that aforementioned North wall - under one of the three windows into my bedroom -  sat two plastic bags.  One bag contained to go containers that needed no further investigation, the other contained library books.

If you want to know what sort of literature bums check out from the library and then leave behind an air conditioning unit in one of those black plastic bags that corner stores stuff with consumer vices then here is a sampling:

1. Diseases and Disorders Handbook. Ed. Regina D. Ford
2. The Prince. Niccolo Machiavelli
3. Witchcraft: It's Power in the World Today. William Seabrook

Or as I subjectively interpreted the titles as I gingerly pulled back the black plastic to reveal the moldy titles:

1. (What's going on with this ailment and is this behavior really my fault?)
2. (How to control my peers.)
3. (Are all those utterances actually bewitching curses?)

The strangeness began August 12th, 2016 when I asked a man to leave who was leaning up again my apartment building in between my bedroom window and my new roommates window.  His face revealed no ill-will towards me but sort of haunts me in it's lack of understanding towards my request - if you don't have a home, why would someone ask you not to rest upon the wall of their own?

Soon after I came upon the trash left by my air conditioning unit and decided to rid it of my sight.  Now a month later, the presence of some odd library titles has me pondering again the daily existence of the marginalized and the proximity in which those with and those without lay their heads down at night.  I have no doubts I shared a wall with an unseen fellow man in the past year - the books, the takeout, the Ice Mountain gallon jug, but mainly the appropriate space for a sleeping human to lie guarded by air conditioning units, forest green electrical boxes and pine trees on the North exterior wall of my bedroom.  It's an alien intimacy, an unknowing solidarity, a closeness to the far out.

Forgive me for I threw out the moldy library books, and I'll forgive, but not forget, my complacency in this culture for allowing all of this shit to exist.