I wake up to my neighbor’s alarm. 

When I was moving into my apartment, this neighbor waved at me in the hallway and said to knock against our shared bedroom wall if she was ever being too loud. I said, “Will do!” knowing full well I won’t do, would never do, you couldn’t pay me to do. 

And truthfully, I like the noise bleed. I lived in Brooklyn before migrating to Los Angeles, and I miss the feeling of people being stacked on top of each other, jockeying for space. New York was the first place I chose to live as an adult (if you could call me that at 21), and it really shaped my idea of what a city should be: loud, layered, full of trains. 

I’m reminded of all those studies that suggest your first serious relationship establishes how you approach intimacy moving forward. And by “all those studies,” I guess I specifically mean the one about virgin rats and tiny jackets. So I’m the sexually naïve rodent, and Brooklyn is wearing a jacket, and I don’t like Los Angeles as much because it’s not also wearing a jacket? Not my best metaphor. It’s early. 

But back to my neighbor. She turns her alarm off and starts puttering around, which makes me feel like I should start my own morning putter. I scroll through emails, see the reminder that today is My Assigned Day, and immediately get anxious. 

I allow myself a couple minutes to spiral about it, featuring chart-toppers like: 

• Maybe I could email back and bail on the project? 
• I could always fake a family emergency. 
• But karmically, that would almost certainly induce a real family emergency. 
• With all four of my nonagenarian grandparents still alive, it’s not worth the risk. 
• I just wish I were doing something even marginally exciting today, like seeing a band or taking a trip or getting my annual skin screening.
• It’s fine, I’ll be fine, I’m overthinking it. 

And then I get up to check on the spider. 

She’s been lurking against my living room ceiling for the past few days. My family had a pet tarantula growing up – or I should say Dad had a pet tarantula, and we all politely observed him taking care of her. That exposure to Huge & Fuzzy has made me pretty tolerant of Small & Spindly, as long as we keep our distance from each other. 

Thankfully she’s still stationed in her usual nook, so I make myself some coffee (electric kettle, French press, and objectively bad Hawaiian Hazelnut flavored grounds that I just can’t quit) then sit at my desk to sift through my digital stack of missives: 

A text from Austin about a seed oils podcast; an email from Jackie about a short film we’re collaborating on; a dispatch from Chloe about how much her undergrad students hate Lorrie Moore, which feels like a cardinal sin; a second dispatch from Chloe saying they’re forgiven because they love ZZ Packer. Addie sends word that someone on the leaderboard for her Peloton ride set their location as “Kingdom of Heaven,” and another as “RIP Mom miss you.” I’m affirmed in my choice not to fake that family emergency, since deaths come in threes. 

As if summoned, a message from my not-yet-resting-in-peace mom comes in. She’s a Presbyterian pastor, but also a stained glass artist (she made the mandala piece hanging in my window), and now a newly minted fantasy novelist. I sent her feedback on the first draft of her manuscript, and she’s asking for clarification on one of my notes. I offer an overly wordy explanation, something about choice versus destiny, characters being active versus reactive. She’s much more economical in her reply. 

“Thank you. Choice is important to the plot.” Amen, sister. 

At 11am, I hop on a Zoom with the creative team behind a project I’ve been developing. I’m working on two television pitches at the moment, which generally means months of writing, followed by months of practicing how to talk about that writing. “It should sound less rehearsed,” our managers chime in after our tenth rehearsal. 

This meeting, though, is just to talk about the series overview and pilot outline I submitted to our producer. I brace for a litany of notes, but it turns out that the gang feels great about the pages. Quick and painless, onwards and upwards. 

I have a library book to return, so I text Carolyn to see if she’s up for a long neighborhood walk & talk. The news keeps catastrophizing about the upcoming rainstorm. An atmospheric river, they say. We rationalize that we should get some steps in while we can, before the Biblical flood. 

We stop for coffee, chat with the barista about my Pop 2 shirt, lust after the café’s mismatched chess set. Carolyn’s mom calls. She’s worried about the storm in the way all moms worry about storms approaching their daughters on the opposite side of the country: if something happens, you’re so far away. Rainfall estimates have ballooned from two inches to five. It doesn’t sound like much of a difference until I think of haircuts. Asking for two off and losing five? I’d cry. Across the street, the sprinklers at the Scientology building sputter on, unconcerned. 

Outside the library, we wonder if we’ll ever work again. In LA, no one is unemployed. We’re all “between jobs,” because of course another one is coming. It’s definitely on its way. We swear. But hopefully not like I’m “on my way” in the group chat, when I’m actually standing in a towel, hair dripping, staring down the barrel of my closet. 

Carolyn and I part ways, and I go back to my cave to gearshift from television to poetry, which I studied in college but haven’t dabbled in much since. Now I’m in a weekly workshop to dust off the cobwebs, and I have to crank out a new piece by EOD. 

Back in college, I mostly wrote in form. I liked the puzzle of it all. But these days everything I write is so rooted in narrative. It makes me jealous of the other writers in the workshop who are comfortable letting go of the side of the pool. 

While I waffle on line breaks in a piece I’m not totally sold on yet, I remember a Ted Berrigan quote I stumbled across years ago: “You should write every poem that is given to you to write, if you can. Because if you don’t write it, perhaps no one will, and those poems will be lost, which none of us can afford.” 

I return to the quote a lot. I’m so meticulous about the way I build scripts, but the source of my poems is such a mystery to me. It does seem external though. My process is generally “swim around until something bites my leg.” 

Around 4pm, I come up for air – and coffee. I microwave the dregs of this morning’s French press and think about when I lived in the same city as Chloe (of “my students hate Lorrie Moore” fame) and we called our afternoon caffeine re-up “fast depression.” 

I relocate to my kitchen table while the sun sets to make some final poem tweaks. The church next door loans out their parking lot to a nearby medical complex during the week, and I like to listen to the end of shift chatter as nursing students wander back to their cars. Today, a woman is telling her two coworkers about her obsession with dictators. “Saddam Hussein was horrible. But he also wrote romance novels.” 

I Google it immediately. There are conflicting opinions about the alleged authorship, but she’s mostly right. The books were originally published anonymously: “Written by He Who Wrote It.” I absently wonder if this is a poem nibbling on my leg, but I already submitted my piece for the week, so I kick it deeper into the water.

At 7:30pm I join another video call – this time with my writing group – and gearshift back to screenwriting. We’re all in Los Angeles and usually meet in person, but tonight we lean on the atmospheric river excuse. We talk about the rain, then Jessica’s extremely funny feature outline, then back to the rain. Which still has yet to make an appearance.  

I think back to my Texas childhood, the tornado sirens and the storm shelter my parents put in our backyard. The one we never ended up having to use. How when the contractors came to start digging out the space for it, we forgot to warn them about the dog we’d buried there several years earlier. How they freaked out when they unearthed his bones (a fair reaction). I try to remember what we did with the tarantula after she died, besides replace her with a new tarantula. If she was buried next to our dog. I make a note to ask Dad in the morning. 

A couple hours later, the rain finally arrives. I try to crack my window a tiny bit to hear the patter more, but the humidity makes the paint on the frame stick. I don’t force it. My downstairs neighbor has historically not been as charmed by apartment soundscapes as I am. 

I off-ramp my day by dipping into my book club’s pick for the month: Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil. My cat is here, too. She’ll hang out with me until dawn, when she’ll relocate to the kitchen and stare at her auto-feeder for an hour. 

My lights are on a timer, and at 11pm the lamp on my headboard politely powers down for the night. It’s my signal to do the same. 

I try my window one more time, and it jolts open. Just an inch, but that’s more than enough to let the noise in. 

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Anna Lockhart is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. Previous credits include The Rehearsal, The Curse, and The Afterparty. She was also awarded “Best Rat Skinner” in her 9^th grade biology lab, if you ever need help with that kind of thing.