I’d picked up Dan’s monthly meds at the University Village pharmacy when the glass doors slid shut behind me and I stepped into their world.
At the time, I only noticed the overflowing plants and flowers in boxes, beds and hanging pots weirdly lit by the setting sun. It wasn’t the slow or languid light of a warm Seattle evening, but I recall thinking it was more like an MDMA from the 90’s induced, kind of soft-around-the-edges while charged with an exposed electrical wire, light.
I heard murmuring from an undefinable-aged woman sitting on a curved bench. Her tanned legs were crossed and tucked beneath her, running shoes neatly arranged on the ground below. A glance might yield a typical, upper middleclass Seattleite shopping at the overpriced village, but a stare revealed more. The neon trims of her shoes were dull, a splatter of, maybe dried mustard, marked her Lycra short and the cuffs of her yoga sleeved athletic top were grimy and darkened.
Candy wrappers littered the bench where she packed and unpacked her used pharmacy bag. My car softly beeped, and I got inside. As I pulled the belt across, our eyes met, and hers squinted in the waning sun. I can still hear her raspy voice mutter, “watch” a few times before she returned to the plastic bag.
I remember the little chill she caused because it felt oddly similar to being in a fast-moving car and sticking my face out the window as a kid. My car’s silence seemed intentional as I backed up and headed toward Ballard for the takeaway burgers Dan ordered. I pondered the strip of life around the University of Washington as I drove and I recall thinking it was such an odd combination of too many white Tesla’s clogging the roads and not enough homes, or rehabs, garbage removal or something. Caught in traffic at a long light I remember watching two sunburned men squeeze inside a dirty doorway of what was once a gleaming showroom for shiny new cars, and struggle to light their small glass pipe.
Crawling near the overpass I watched the fleshy arms of a woman with neon green hair gesticulate in the crosswalk and proclaim “watch, watch, watch” to another large woman whose spaghetti straps strained to keep a small black dress attached to her curves. I remember feeling the chill a second time.
When I reached the overpass, a man’s face surfaced out of the weeds. A forty- something white guy twisted his black baseball cap to the side, raised his face skyward and yelled, “watch!”
I now know, I knew then; something was wrong, but so much in the world literally was wrong, I brushed the anxiety aside. I’d covered politics in my daily recording for work and couldn’t finish the list of breaking catastrophes for the first time. The second recording, my personal archive, ended up being what they really wanted. Gulping down the irony, I remember lamenting those recordings would likely end up gathering dust in a garage the way boxes of photo albums rested in peace upon cement in my basement.
Nothing could’ve been further from the truth.