Living Room

We are all voyeurs. We look into others lives with accidental intention and try to refrain from making comment, from correcting the misplaced apostrophes. Accidental intention cannot be said of my neighbour however.

I believe a neighbour is anyone who noses their way into your life, whether it be, asking what you are cooking for dinner, in the hopes that it might appear on their doorstep, or watching you from their windows with a great deal of intention. To me, a neighbour is not the person who lives in the apartment next door, the unnamed antagonist who keeps me up at night, going insane over their bad taste in music. Think: the circus meets Pavarotti. There is never talking or shuffling footsteps, but always muffled artificiality, seeping through the walls and encasing my bed in stone, in noisy, badly played stone.

But back to my neighbour, the one who has scrawled ‘my windows look into your living room’ in black marker on their window. There may be two footpaths, a four lane road, a thousand cars, several flights of stairs and our whole lives separating us, but this neighbour feels inherently close to me, to my life. They are in the living room of my mind. Always, just waiting, sipping a quiet tea while I’m out back going mad over caffeine. They are just sitting, waiting.

I can’t recall if the writing had been there since I’d moved in, or if it was newly written, and in my own secret pain I’d failed to notice. My neighbour watches as I slip into another narcoleptic state on the couch. I don’t actually own a couch, or the traditional meaning of the word. What I own is chairs, many chairs. Chairs that form in the shape of a couch but never mimic the indulgent comfort. I’d learned to live with this, told myself it was only what I deserved.

My neighbour watches me as I sit on the floor with the blinds flung together, drawn open, knees to my chest, sobbing because I had just let everything go for the second time in my life and it didn’t feel good like it did the first. They watched me as I began to wonder why. The person in the apartment next door did not see this, nor did they hear it. But my neighbour sees everything; they live my life with me through four panes of glass. They watch me sit on the balcony on my vintage bicycle, eyes shut, speeding blindly through the streets, ringing the bell madly and knocking people down like they were empty rubbish bins. They understand why I do this on the balcony and not the street. Because the street is full of terrible people like the person who lives next door, listening to circus opera.

Me and my neighbour, we understand that the city is not brimming with life, full of people surging through its veins. We understand that this is a desert we live in, that it is only as real as we let ourselves believe, and that at any given moment this desert will become imaginary, and we will be separated from one another forever.

So when those words scrawled on the window begin to make me feel uneasy, I just remind myself, this person, this person is my neighbour. My neighbour understands me, understands why I’m alone all the time, why I’ll never leave the house again, and why no one will ever come to my door. My neighbour understands because they wait for me in the living room of my mind, every night, just waiting. Waiting for me.