On the street where I live

Her car has been parked on my street for months. There is no way to see through the vehicle. Its windows are stuffed with plastic bags filled with the detritus of a life I can’t imagine living. She is tall and the kind of thin that looks cold no matter the season.

I’ve lived on this street for nearly two years. It is lined with proper brick row houses and brownstones. The neighborhood is clutched tightly by that monster gentrification. I am positive I am just a symptom of the greater disease to my neighbors. I live between construction sites and smile at the crews when I leave in the mornings. They treat me with the same smiles and nods that they give to her. She has been here forever and never looks up from the ground as she shuffles down the sidewalk.

Her Toyota Camry is from the early aughts. The green is dull, and the rims are bent on the three tires they still hang from tenaciously. The windows have tape in some places. On the rare occasion that I have seen the trunk cracked, it is equally full of stuffed bags though they are more like the plastic woven type I bought at IKEA when I moved here for the express purpose of toting my laundry from home to cleaners. She has filled hers with empty plastic bottles that crinkle audibly even from across the street.

Whatever led to her hoarding, it is not on display for the neighborhood. She walks to her car wrapped in an ankle-length down coat that matches her car salt stain for salt stain with a knit cap pulled tightly over her ears. Always her face is sad. She opens the car door, sifts bags of the remnants of her life around, extracts one bag and peers into it for a moment before shoving it back in to the gap she created. I make a point of not staring. The door closes easily as the bags seem to exist like clay inside a mold at this point. Everything has its place even if nothing has a recognizable purpose anymore.

I see others follow her with their eyes as I do, and I wonder how many of us watch each other in a city where knowing your neighbor is as unusual as being on a first name basis with anyone outside your office and your favorite bagel shop. I wonder if she notices us noticing her. The windshield is completely obscured by plastic bags, the driver’s seat too, and the most miraculous part of its whole existence seems to be that it manages to make it from one side of the street to the other on alternate side parking mornings. I’ve seen the footwells, and the pedals aren’t visible.

Walking down the street tonight, I noticed there were two bags shoved under rear bumper. They’re the woven plastic variety and bulge. I don’t know if she pulled them out and left them there, or if the amount of plastic she has collected has finally extended beyond the steel frame of her vehicle. Regardless, I worried that two bags of garbage would be the only indication that something was wrong with someone I see almost daily.

A car full of waste and two bags of garbage are all that stand between this tall, lonely woman and disappearing into the void that is a city teeming with life.