(Full disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. This story is set in multiple cities I have lived in, and their descriptions are based in my experience. The twelve-step meetings are procedurally accurate. The names of meetings, characters in them and identifying details are fake. No harm nor disparagement is intended with any description of anything in the story.)
-Sasuke-
I am not miserable every day of my life. I do not constantly have anxiety attacks. Moving here was necessary, not desired. I grew up in a suburb of Seattle, on the Eastside. I moved an hour north, to be here. It's a lot smaller. It's larger than the small town I used to be in, in the summer. That town had only five hundred people. I miss my old city a lot. The public transit system was okay, there was stuff to do and I never worried about people breaking into my family's house. I don't really miss my family, though. They never visit me here.
I live here now. I thought it was going to be a quiet town where I could get my life together. Figure shit out, take the world by storm. Wrong. Every mile, there is a large liquor store. Every surface every five feet has gang-related graffiti. Every other step is broken glass, or glass you accidentally break when you step on it because you couldn't see it. Businesses shut down left and right. The three restaurants of an internationally famous fast food chain, all three in this city within a mile of one another, all have had broken ice cream machines for months and broken soda machines for weeks. The soda machines all have the same handwritten "Out of order!" written on torn loose-leaf paper taped across their center. Customers are offered free water instead, with an apologetic, tired or even embarrassed smile.
Trash litters the too-tall, unkempt grass near the sidewalks. Roadkill and used condoms announce themselves on the cracked sidewalks. Dive-thru coffee joints with bikini baristas dot every half-mile. These ones aren't the normal ones, they're fronts for prostitution. The cops raid and shut any down, and a replacement is up in a week. Other prostitutes are often seen with customers in darkened parking lots at night. Drug deals are common. I get asked every day, usually at six in the morning when I'm waiting for transit, if I have crack, pot, or heroin, or materials widely known to make them. I don't. It's fine to be out at four in the morning usually. When the sun is setting, the problems begin. One cannot wear any bandanna here, as it indicates gang membership. This is a loud, poor city. My apartment complex is one of the few in the north part of the city. There's another complex half a mile from here. It's even more run-down. The rest are all trailer parks and motels with low weekly rates.
Youth violence is so common here. It's not even safe to be here at noon. Teenagers pull knives on each other. I stay in my apartment as much as I can. I really only go out for a few things: the doctor, groceries, fast food sometimes and to refill my transit pass. So far I am okay. Nobody violent lives in the three complexes that I know of. Mine is unusually large: it has a hundred and twenty apartments in it, stacked like boxes. The others are not so. I did have a neighbor for awhile who was slightly unhinged. He was often drunk, angry and had mental problems. He soon moved out. The couple I refer to as the sex couple promptly moved back in. They've moved into the same apartment, the one next to mine, three times in nine months. The walls are so thin, I often hear them. And the neighbor across the hall, who unloads her dishes at eight at night. The walls are thin. The neighbors can probably hear me playing music on my stereo or listening to the radio at night. I need that to sleep. They likely smell my cooking of cheap, frozen meals. I smell theirs.
The street lights never flicker here. Maybe it's because this is a poor, rough neighborhood, and the street lights make people feel more secure. I do, with them. My original city's street lights did flicker. It was really annoying in the thick morning fog that defined late autumn and all winter. The lights going out made everything so dark. Here, it doesn't happen even in winter. Maybe the street lights flickered and nobody cared because of the low crime rate, but here they do. There are creeps here and the lights do deter them mostly. That, and the real possibility of a fatal car crash.
I live on one of the most dangerous highways in the state, possibly the country. Pedestrians and especially bicyclists are hit and killed all the time. Jaywalking across the six-lane highway is common, and responsible for most of the accidents. I have jaywalked only once. A fighting dog was guarding a homeless guy, and a stranger warned me. There was no way I could pass. We looked at each other, and waited for the cars speeding sixty-five to eighty miles an hour to cease, and ran across the road. I never want to do that again. A sidewalk, cracked and covered in broken glass, road kill and trash, separates me from this highway with asshole drivers.
And in this all, there is one of the most disturbing things that have happened to me: a few nights ago, I think I heard a murder. I don't know.
The noise from the highway covered most of it up.