Neighborly Apathy
In Which I Psychoanalyze My Insane Neighbors
I share a bedroom wall with this couple, who are the muse that keeps on giving. I wish, desperately, that I didn’t know so much about their personal lives. I wish that they weren’t providing as much inspiration for my writing as they are. But when I wake up after a night of tossing and turning, earplugs in, trying to drown out their screaming, fighting, and furniture-throwing with ad-free rain sounds on YouTube, they are understandably all that’s on my mind.
I wrote about them a while back, penning that living in an apartment means dissolving the boundaries of your space and letting the outside encroach. I hear teenage sons yelling at their video games and fathers banging on their doors, demanding them to be quiet. I’ve heard parties being thrown, people having sex. And I’ve heard couples fight nasty fights, oblivious, or perhaps indifferent, to the fact that the walls are practically paper.
Looking back at my first essay about the couple who live next door, I wrote that anger is one of the more challenging emotions for me to sympathize with, mainly because it’s not one I express myself very often, at least not in a conventional way. Every emotion I feel at full volume inevitably manifests as tears; happiness, sadness, rage, stress, loneliness, all of it. I haven’t felt an impulse to throw chairs or slam doors since I was maybe a toddler. That’s not to say that I think I’m better than this couple, necessarily, but that I truly do not understand them.
In my first essay, I wrote about wanting boundaries to remain intact between the members of the couple and between the couple and me. But these so-called boundaries have only become more threadbare as the months have dragged on. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fist fully punches through my drywall one day. When I wake to the sound of high-pitched screams and IKEA chairs being thrown at IKEA bedframes, my comforter feels like cement. Without the option to fight or flee, freezing is all you’re left with.
Let me tell you what happened last night.
