I lay on my bed after my nap. The CD of Russian choral music had run its course. My roommate was away, writing a paper on campus. The sun had set, or almost.

The blinds on my roommate's window were up.
The headlights of cars passing north and south
passed in opposite directions on the walls and the door,
always fading on my wall if they were
going south, and on hers if they were going north.
Some were brighter, some less so,
and some lasted longer, while some went faster
through the cycle of brightening and fading on my walls.

And this happens every evening, since I live on busy Shattuck,
and people are always driving up and down my street,
in each of their separate journeys,
falling into the same patterns that I
have seen over and over, time and again,

like love and hate, birth and death, all these human experiences
that are individual journeys that everyone takes using the same street,
up and down,

and in the early morning people drive one way to be mistresses
and on the way back at night to be adulterers or cheated-on wives.

And their headlights play on my walls every night when I turn the lights off, even if I close these shitty blinds, and I have to get used to them each night before I can go to sleep.