DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE Poem: Between What Is and What Could Be, by Maggie Bowman

The streets never sleep.
Like me—up at 6, out the door by 7.
Starting on Valencia Boulevard.
You know Valencia, right?
Where the lights never sync and traffic crawls for miles around the mall,
past the Valencia Town Center, the courthouse, the library—
all the places I can never stop for.
The green spaces? They’re there, sure,
but I only see them in passing.
It’s rush hour.
I hit the 5, the 405, then the 118.
Every day, a metal river, exhaust fumes thick as the air.
I roll down the window, choke on the mix of
gasoline, street tacos, wet asphalt—
the horns blaring like a pulse too fast, too loud.
I inch toward another 8 to 5,
just enough to keep me here, but not enough to own a damn thing.

$2,300 a month for rent, then utilities on top.
And sure, the medical bills are covered—thank God for that—
but disability doesn’t replace the hours he can’t work.
Three times a week, dialysis drains him.
You ever been to one of those clinics?
It smells like bleach, like something hollow,
machines clicking away like clockwork,
whirring his blood through sterile tubes.
I sit there, in plastic chairs that don’t bend,
watching time drip slow as the IV.
We don’t worry about the bills anymore.
But everything else? Yeah, we worry.
How long do we keep pretending we’re okay?

We talk about it sometimes,
my husband and me,
over cold leftovers at 9,
joking about mortgages we’ll never touch.
Laughing about pawning the TV,
because dark humor’s cheaper than therapy.
But beneath the jokes, there’s anger.
It swells, rises up like the rent—
faster than we can hold it down.
He’s barely 43, his body slowing before its time,
and I’m just trying to hold on to the pieces
while my own time slips away.

I’m in my 40s now.
And when the hum of the fridge is the only sound,
I think about motherhood—
how it slipped through my fingers.
I was too busy holding everything else together.
I missed the window.
Chasing experiences instead of diapers.
My body’s clock ticking louder than that damn dialysis machine.
There was hope once.
Doctors, technology, science—they promised a way.
But now?
Now, even that’s being torn apart.
Laws tightening like a noose around my choices.
Hope? Hope’s a distant memory,
just another thing they took away,
while we were too busy surviving to notice.

I don’t know my neighbors.
Do you know yours?
Thin walls filled with arguments, sirens down the street every night.
But we keep quiet, like strangers,
stacked on top of each other in apartments that feel
like temporary shelters.
Not homes.
Who can afford to know anyone here?
We’re all just counting the days,
praying nothing breaks that we can’t afford to fix.

Still, I rise each morning,
pulling on the same worn shoes,
walking the same cracked streets of Santa Clarita.
We make do.
Me, my husband, the furbabies.
Our small family in this rented space,
living between what is and what could be.
We carry hope in fragments now,
stitching it together with love, soft purrs, and wagging tails.
But let’s be real—
this city takes more than it gives,
and I’m tired of waiting for a break
that might never come.

But here’s the thing—
I’m still standing.
And that’s more than they expected