When the traffic light turns green, why don’t they move? Why do they just sit there? Maybe they’re afraid of some speed-demon crossing the intersection against the light that just turned red for him. Don’t they know the lights are timed? What are they afraid of? Why don’t they move already? Maybe they’re on their cell phone, texting or checking the weather. Why don’t they move? So frustrating.

I was married and had kids when I met her. She was a couple years younger than me, but we shared a lot of the same interests. Stuff like reading and talking about ideas, things my wife had no interest in. She likes to watch TV. This other girl, she reads books and likes to talk about what happens in them. You don’t find that a lot these days. Who reads books?

I remember when Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the poor neighbourhoods of New Orleans and other parts of the south. When criticism of the government began to spread, affluent TV commentators would ask “why don’t they move?” never thinking, or not caring, if the victims were too impoverished to pack up their family’s lives and go somewhere else. Sometimes you can’t move, or you think you can’t, and it ends up being the same thing.

After work on Fridays we’d sometimes go out for a couple beers. Not every Friday, and sometimes it was wine, but nothing ever happened. I never told my wife and she never told her husband, of course, because how would they understand that sometimes you just need that time? Sometimes you just need to talk to someone else, someone who shares your interests. We’d talk about books we’d read, or movies we’d seen. We’d argue, sometimes, and then not talk for days. Sometimes the talk would get racy, a little too close to the bone, maybe, but nothing ever happened. Sometimes you just need to talk.

Then there was that year my sister-in-law and her boyfriend and their various kids moved next door. “Why don’t they move?” I’d ask my wife, who I knew loved having her sister and her niece and nephews right next door, but I hated it. I hated having them so close, and how their fighting and their drama would spill across the gulf between our houses and disrupt our home, and it all kind of stopped that night when the ambulance came and took him away. They had had a fight that escalated so much that he had a stroke right then and there. The oldest boy had said that the man had been complaining of a headache, and the woman, my sister-in-law, had pounded the table with a bottle of Tylenol and screamed repeatedly at him “Why don’t you take some of these?” as she pounded away. Now he walks with a cane and lives somewhere else, and strangers live in the house next door and I prefer it that way, honestly. Just because you live next door to each other doesn’t mean you have to be friends, or even talk to each other.

I guess I liked her well enough when we moved in together; my wife, I mean, although she wasn’t my wife then, just my girlfriend. I must have liked her, otherwise why would I have asked her to move in with me? I mean, we both needed a new place to stay and were running out of time, but we liked each other well enough and got along back in those days. Our first apartment was an absolute shithole, but we made the most of it and got along pretty well most of the time. There was that one night when we were totally broke except for nine dollars or something, and we spent it on a pizza and a soda that we shared, because neither of us was getting paid until the next day and we needed to eat. It seemed romantic, bringing that pizza and that single soda back to our lousy apartment, which was right on the main drag so you could hear the tractor-trailer air brakes around the clock, although you got used to it and eventually could more or less sleep through the night. I don’t think we ever met any of our neighbours in that run-down apartment building, but it was nice when the sandwich shop opened on the first floor, right under our apartment, and I could pad down the stairs in my socks and get a submarine sandwich and a Styrofoam bowl of chili for lunch and take it back upstairs to eat. I was working overnights at the time, and that was real convenient, that sandwich shop that opened up right on the first floor. Sometimes I’d wake up to the smell of chili, and that was pretty great, until they moved.

Eventually we moved to a much nicer apartment on a much quieter street, but it was a third floor apartment. Other than the house we live in now, it’s the only place either of our kids ever remembers living in; we were there for nearly ten years, believe it or not. I used to park my car in the lot behind the house, which really only accommodated three cars but sometimes as many as five cars would be crammed in there, angry tenants demanding space even if there really was none to be had. One spring I went down to get in my car, and the engine wouldn’t start. The mechanic told me squirrels had eaten through some wire, which he replaced and charged me a hundred dollars. I told him “I knew I shouldn’t have bought those cheap, acorn-flavoured wires,” but he didn’t laugh. Sometimes people just don’t get it, or maybe he’d heard it all before.

There are a lot of squirrels in our town, always darting across the road in front of cars and more often than not, freezing halfway across and just standing there motionless, waiting for the inevitable. It makes you wonder. Sometimes you can’t move, or you think you can’t, and it ends up being the same thing.

That girl, I gave her a book for her birthday. It seemed like the kind of writing that she enjoys the most. Maybe we’ll talk about it, although we don’t talk as much as we used to. Maybe she’ll talk about it to her husband, although he’s not really the type of guy who reads, or talks about books. I don’t know what she sees in him, but it must be something. Sometimes he makes her cry, but she stays with him. I wonder if he ever bought her a book. They’ve been together a long time, so it seems like he’d have to have bought her a book at some point. There’s this used bookstore about an hour from here that I told her about once. Just thousands and thousands of old books in piles and on shelves, the kind of place you could lose yourself in all day. Once in a while, back when we still worked together, I’d suggest we go down there together and look for books; I’d even say we should bring our spouses and make a day of it. But she never seriously entertained the idea. It was too risky, I’m sure she thought, although sometimes I wonder what either of us ever had to lose.