Touching the void (AM)

One of the great things about living alone in your own place is that you can take your pants of when you get home from work and just get about in opaque stockings and ugg boots and no one gets hurt.

What's not great about living alone is that you have no one to consult with when scary/weird things happen and you don't know what to do.

Yesterday, I was on the balcony checking on my tomato plant which has been growing all winter even though everyone knows tomatoes are a summer crop.

This is what confusion looks like.

That tomato plant is a crazy son-of-a-bitch and a truly inspirational against-all-odds story of triumph against adversity. I swear I have done nothing to it to make it grow and produce fruit in winter other than check on it all the time and think about it a lot while I am at work. And because I love it so much I was out there checking on it yesterday morning.

I was also looking at the lettuce and carrot zone...

...and trying really hard not to pick the carrots because they are too small, but wanting to because the carrot tops look so healthy.

I effed up guys. I just picked a couple, I really couldn't help myself. 

So there I was, all up in my balcony nature, when I heard the sound of water coming from a tap down below. I peered over the edge and saw a woman drinking from the tap in my front yard, a mere three metres below me and in plain of the whole street.

The woman was about 50, scrawny, had a lot of bags and looked, in the words of Gotye, rough. She had that cagey unsettled look that people beloved of narcotics often have, and as she started putting her head under the tap to give her hair a bit of a rinse, I started to worry. I wanted her to turn the tap off and continue on her way, but she appeared to dawdle as though she had other business at the tap.  Then, she reached in to her bag and pulled out what appeared to be a long strip of toilet paper.

At this point, I started to wish I didn't live alone, or at least that there was someone else with me on the balcony with whom I could exchange a frightened look. Why does she have toilet paper? I wanted to know. Why isn't she moving along? I also wanted to know. There was no one but me and my stupid brain to ponder these questions, and my brain was being so useless it might has well not have shown up at all.

The questions kept on coming as I watched her move in to a position that though I tried interpret as something - anything! - else, was pretty clearly and unmistakably the squat position, and started to pull her pants down.

Because I am polite and was terrified, I cleared my throat and said "Excuse me" as though I was asking a shop assistant if they have any more sizes.

She leaped up and mumbled something like "I can't hold on" and then grabbed her bags and walked off in that rapid fire way that scrawny, rough people walk.

All of this happened at about 11:30am on a Sunday and readers,  you do not know solitude until you've stood on your balcony and watched a woman ready herself to use your front yard, a yard with no fence that is only distinguished from the footpath by a bunch of pebbles, as a toilet. Clearly a woman who would do such a thing is experiencing her own challenges and so I don't want to come down on her too  hard but fucking hell you guys. I wish I didn't have to have that in my head, and in my head alone!

So, um, thanks for listening guys.