Shattered
December 5, 2001there is broken glass everywhere, and i don’t even know how to begin to clean it up. i want to pretend it is not there. i want to crawl back into bed and wake up at 7:30 like i do every other day. i want it to be every other day.
somebody broke into my car last night, sometime between 7pm and 7am, during which time i complained about the traffic, got take out thai food, made eyes at a fish in a fishtank, rented sixteen candles, watched felicity with my girlfriends, ate a krispy kreme donut, watched sixteen candles, and then slept early because i just didn’t have any energy to do anything else.
i woke up at 6, for no apparent reason, for the second time this week. i stayed in bed for another hour and then i remembered that last night i’d parked on the wrong side of the street, the street cleaning side, and had to move it out of the space by 8 to avoid getting a parking ticket.
i parked on the wrong side of the street.
when i looked out my window — peering through a crack in my blinds like i always do — i noticed my car trunk was open. did i leave that open last night?
no, i couldn’t have. i wouldn’t have.
i threw on some clothes, stepped outside and cautiously wandered across the street to where my car was parked. the rear window was smashed. i walked around and stared at it, shattered like cracked crème brûleé, glistening in the morning sun.
they must have taken my cd player, i immediately thought, the $50 discman my parents got me for christmas, but i didn’t want to know what else they took. i didn’t know what else they possibly could take. i didn’t care. i just couldn’t bear to stand there anymore, dumbfounded and groggy, so i pulled my jacket and scarf around my body and marched right back into my house. i called my dad and started to cry.
it’s so strange how sad and violated and upset i feel, i told rima, as she poured me coffee. i keep thinking about the hundreds of pages of police reports i pored over during my year at the Times. i had to find something worth reporting and condense it into two lines of print. and now those two lines were me.
700 Block Christine’s Street: A $50 portable CD player was stolen from a 1987 Acura Integra. The rear right window was smashed.
i don’t even care about the CD player. my only concerns are how now my mother will not be able to sleep at night because she thinks her daughter lives in the ghetto and how i will have to tell eric that the CD he lent me is gone and how things like this, and things far worse, happen to people everyday. today it just happened to be me.