Anytime my upstairs neighbors have a conversation, I can hear it. There’s one going right now.
Not clearly—not enough to understand what’s being said—but it’s loud enough that I can differentiate between voices and sometimes my over-ear headphones blasting The Score at full volume don’t entirely block out the murmur in the background. It’s wildly annoying and I regularly consider buying a broom just so I can fully embody the crotchety neighbor I am at heart and bang on the ceiling, but mainly it worries me. If I can hear all of this from them, what on earth do they hear from my end?
I try not to play things out loud past midnight, but I have a poor concept of time. It happens. Sometimes I look up and it’s three in the morning and Critical Role is still playing in the background. Were my neighbors subjected to Matt Mercer imitating a manticore avenging her murdered child last Friday? What about when I moved in and played The Magnus Archives for sixteen hours straight? That was a feat on my Spotify Wrapped. Can they tell when I’m dancing; do they hear the same forty seconds of a Noah Kahan song over and over and over again? I can hear Alexa announcing when their doorbell rings. Do they have to listen to my sister and I slowly turning into our mother while we talk on the phone for hours on end?
My upstairs neighbors have walked their guests out and are now standing right outside, a mere two feet from my front door. This close, I can understand every single word—someone’s hair was insulted at work last week. If it weren’t eight o’clock on a Monday night, I might even try to peek through the curtains, get some context for the hairstyle in question.
I can’t tell whose voice belongs to whom. For one, I’m terrible at that in general, and for another, I’ve lived here going on two years and I’ve never met a single neighbor. Seen plenty of the maintenance workers who operate out of an empty unit at the end of our building, but never crossed paths with anyone in this twenty-four unit building. This is just a side effect of being 24, I guess.
The conversation is petering off; my neighbor has her house shoes on and can’t go outside, can’t follow her friend out to the car. There’s still a low murmur from upstairs, but I think it’s the TV going in another room.
It’s times like these that are comforting.
I don’t always hear talking upstairs, but it’s a family who lives up there. I’m home a lot, and especially when I first moved in, when I was unemployed, I didn’t hear nearly enough of anything to mean I could hear everything. I’ve listened to a largely unintelligible whale documentary via my neighbors, as well as whatever song of the week the oldest daughter feels like singing, but a lot of the times, it’s quiet.
Which means they can’t hear everything—I hope.
I relish in the silence. I live alone and I love it. I hope I’ll always have the means to live alone. Live on my own terms, on my own timeline, on my own soundtrack out loud when I’m putting off cleaning the kitchen for the nth time this week.
But every now and then, as annoying as I find it, I find a small amount of peace in the overhearing. Maybe it’s technically eavesdropping and I only enjoy it because I love to gossip and know everything. Even—or rather, especially—if it’s small-time hair-related drama.
It puts me at ease, kind of. The coexisting. Here we are, in this shitty apartment building, listening to each other living out our respective lives. When I eventually move out, they will be cemented in my mind as the upstairs neighbors who I complain about it incessantly (sorry if you follow me on Twitter) and more often than not wish we had quiet hours written in ink so I could report them to our leasing office.
I think about this a lot, the effect we have on other people. Macklemore said it best—and I’m paraphrasing—the last time you die is the last time somebody mentions your name.
I had this roommate a couple years ago that I hated. She lived her life in a way that I didn’t realize people actually did until I landed in a three bedroom apartment with her and an art student. And yet, I can’t think of the word ‘stir-fry’ without doubling over in laughter.
We have our inside jokes with our friends and family and people who used to be either, and we’ll remember them even when they no longer exist in our lives. But it’s the things from the people who don’t know us that have the most impact on me.
It’s waking up to whale noises on a Saturday morning. It’s someone playing bass guitar every Sunday afternoon like clockwork. It’s seeing HelloFresh boxes three doors down a few weeks after cancelling my own subscription. It’s a New Yorker magazine slid under my door because the mailman always misread the address. It’s twenty-three varying texts suggesting stir-fry for dinner over the course of three minutes because she thought the messages weren’t sending.
It’s creeping on nine o’clock and the TV is going again upstairs. I’m going to keep watching The Home Edit to try and drown it out—and think about how we live in an old building: I can already hear every time they take a step or close a cabinet. Do I really need to listen to siblings fighting into the wee hours of morning, too? Haven’t I had enough?
Hi, I’m Izzy, I’m here to scream into the void (your inbox) about whatever crosses my mind. Some facts about me:
I am a Sagittarius—which is to say, I am impulsive and would like to live in a van.
I write poetry and metaphors and live in a perpetual state of grief.
I am busy. Busier than any human person should be, in fact. I will forget to update this for long stretches of time.
Personality traits include: being tall, making candles, holding dogs.
And in case you couldn’t already tell, I am far too introspective for my own good.