2:33 a.m.

How do you go from the kind of sleep that forgets your existence to complete wakefulness? This morning, I startled from sleep. The apartment was enveloped in the thick darkness that is between 2:00-6:45 on a weekday. On a weekend, this darkness might be full of laughter, last calls, whispers, and even light. The day before work, it is unfamiliar and uncomfortable as a distant relative.

I lay in bed, suddenly very awake, listening. My apartment is one of the quietest in New York City, I think. The windows face an alley that is muted in color and sound. Sometimes I hear the wings of pigeons when they burst into flight. When the subway rumbles and skids to a stop under my building, the radiator rattles. I notice this at night, and sometimes if it is especially still during the day. The rattle reminds me of a cup being placed on a saucer between sips.

But then I heard the soft scuff of shoes in the alley. My body tensed, and I thought of the window, how it was open wide enough for a man to slip through. He'd have to scale the apartment walls maybe five feet from the alley's concrete floor to get to my first floor apartment, but he could do it, possibly grabbing onto the window bars. Window bars he'd have to saw through to get in. I dashed to the window and closed it with a resounding schlunk, unnecessary precaution or not. Then I scrambled back to bed and let the headlines and facts wash over me. Like drinking a liter of soda after a Hostess snack cake binge, it was not good.

In the last week, a woman who eats where I eat, walks where I walk, was brutally raped. I was horrified when I read about what happened to her, a woman my age: a strange man was accidentally buzzed into her apartment building, forced himself into her apartment, and tortured her for nineteen hours. Her eyelids were slit, her beaten body tied to a futon, and the futon later set on fire. Miraculously, she escaped her burning apartment, and the man was later found.

A few days before this happened, on a rainy weekend afternoon, someone buzzed my apartment. I answered it, assuming it was Cade. The buzzer in my building is pretty crackly, as most are. "I lost my cell phone. Buzz me in," a man's voice said. "Cade? Is this Cade?" I asked. The guy answered yes, I buzzed him in, and I never saw anyone actually come into the building. It wasn't Cade. I wondered if it was someone who just wanted to get out of the rain or if it could be someone up to no good. The real Cade and I have since come up with a discreet buzzer passcode.

I've read that crimes and accidents are more likely to occur where we feel safe, places we don't have our guard up. You're more likely to get run over in front of your local supermarket than on that trip to Mexico City. This is what I thought of as I stopped breathing, waiting for more footsteps.

Sleep eluded me as long as I could think of the different layers of my experience with crime. A man with a gun at my old residence hall, my passport getting stolen, the time the scary men circled me in the Bronx on my way to a job interview. I remembered our house getting robbed one weekend when my parents were out of town, Megan and me at my aunt's. Megan cried and cried that "They stoled Flipper," referring to her missing toy plesiosaurus, the one we found a few days later. I'll never forget that brush with crime, either.

That's when it must have occured to me - that home, though apparently fraught with peril, is still home. And then I went back to sleep.