Can we smoke in here?

i’ve mentioned this before, but i have been pretty lucky in the noise department. we are all packed in here very tightly, and i somehow got good neighbours on all sides.

i hear muffled telephones ring, the occasional conversation through the vent in my bathroom, a dog that sometimes gets let out into the hallway to bark at everybody who walks by.

i heard what i think was someone having awful, probably painful sex in the middle of the night. there was no rhythm to the angry banging. it was not effortless, or fun. someone was working very, very hard, and someone was lying there, apparently part of the bedframe, waiting for it to end.

i hear evangelists ringing every doorbell, every fucking doorbell with their incessantly whining für elise, first thing on a saturday morning until the tingling doesn’t leave my ears. i can’t help but think people might be more receptive to their message if they didn’t wake them up on saturday mornings, but maybe that’s too cynical of me.

but tonight. tonight my apartment is quiet. the tv is not on. i am not listening to music. and i can’t hear anything from the street, because i live on the inside of the ‘u’ my apartment makes. the lack of a view is just about worth not hearing the street vendors at 5am. so my apartment is silent, except for my typing and the meowing of a cat.

i have seen a cat in the hallway a few times. unlike the dog, it goes running back to its apartment when interrupted. i have no way of knowing if i am listening to the same cat, but she sounds exactly like one of my cats, idiotic enough to get herself locked in a closet. they used to sleep on shelves of towels or clothes, curled up in the back, and the door, invariably, would inadvertently get shut. a few hours later we’d hear the groggy, panic stricken cat, right after she’d woken up, wailing to be let out, and we’d have a mad dash around the house, wondering which cat it was, which closet it was, how long she’d been in there. and when we found ehr, she’d march out all “where the hell were you?” like she hadn’t been crying desperately, sure she’d been abandoned, a minute before.

it was usually the same cat who, at night, would wail her way through the house, not knowing where any of us were. one of us would, grumbling, pad out into the hallway to her, wave to get her attention (she’s deaf), and haul her back into bed with us, where she’d settle down, starting purring, and we’d wake up to her chewing contentedly on our hair.

and so tonight i am listening to the wailings of a cat, in my empty quiet apartment on the wrong side of the world, and mightily resisting the urge to go dashing out after her.

sigh.