It scared me. The adrenalin hits, and I quake in fear as I watch the big vehicle speed off. I mentally note the licence plate number. The other pedestrians stare, feeling sorry for me or outraged by the incident. I shrug my shoulders. It’s over. What else can I do? My supporters share my outrage and curse out the driver while I wait in line for the ATM. The air conditioning at the bank eventually calms me and my sympathizers down.

A few weeks go by. The incident is filed away along with all the others. 147 BTS. One more entry in my mental ledger.

Back at the beginning of my adult life, I was living with two friends in a student apartment, which is another way of saying an apartment for poor people. We eat a whole lot of pasta because we’re too proud to go complaining to our parents about the monetary constraints of our new-found freedom. Noodles, coffee, weed: pretty much your typical student diet.

Our landlord stubbornly refuses to maintain his apartment building. Our landlord: the crazy old dude we pay rent to; the one who, no matter how many times we ask him, refuses to do anything about the sticky front door, or the two taps that drip relentlessly no matter how firmly we turn them off, or the mould slowly blooming on the bathroom walls, or the four missing window screens, or (and above all) the cold January wind slipping in through a crack between the floor and walls of our three-bedroom apartment.

We live on the third floor, between three layers of wall. Because, instead of taking the time to strip the internal walls down to the studs, some amateur-ass construction guys had the bright idea of just building new ones right over the old ones. We know that, in case you’re wondering, because one night while drinking we slammed a door a little too hard. Through the hole we’d made, we could see the drywall of the previous wall underneath. Since we’d already gone that far, we broke through that layer of drywall, to the brick. Gus made a joke that you could hide a body between the walls. I laughed.