THE LOVE THY NEIGHBOR CHRONICLES - PART V

 CHAPTER 5 – THE CONCLUSION

The neighbor girl vanished in the weeks that followed her verbal altercation with my roommate Sara.  We hypothesized potential explanations.  Perhaps she was so embarrassed about her behavior that she made herself scarce, unable to find the right words to apologize.  The other, and more likely scenario, was that she had drowned alone in her room face down in a puddle of vomit.  Either way, we were thankful for the reprieve from her special brand of alcohol-induced fury – although in all fairness, at this point I personally had yet to see anything but the back of her head. 

As weeks turned into months, the neighbor’s absence became more and more suspect.  One afternoon, I noticed that her door was slightly ajar.  I didn’t think much of it until Sara got home and mentioned it as well.  “There seems to be a funny smell coming from her apartment,” she said. “I think we should go make sure she’s okay.”

I told her she was insane.  There were only three things we knew about this woman; 1) that she had a substance abuse problem, 2) that she struggled with the opening and closing of doors, and 3) she didn’t care much for us.  I felt the need to check on her well being as strongly as I did the need to stick my head into a turbine engine.    

“But what if she’s dead?” Sara asked.  

“Well then playing Nancy Drew isn’t going to bring her back to life, is it?” I told her.  When she expressed her displeasure with that comment, I promised her that we would get involved once the smell of human decay became too much to bare – but not a moment sooner.

 “Well, I’m going over there to make sure she’s okay,” she said, “So you can either be a man and come with me, or you can hide in here like a coward.”  I compromised by going with her like a man while hiding in the corner like a coward. 

Sara lightly knocked on the opened door. “Hello?” she projected into open apartment.  We both listened carefully to hear if there was any movement coming from within, but there was none.  She knocked again, this time a little more loudly, and said “Is everything okay in there? Your door is open.”  Again – silence.  Sara looked back at me in my hiding spot and shrugged.  “Should we go in there?” She asked. 

Suddenly we heard a stomping noise coming from within their apartment.   Before we knew it, the neighbor’s door was slammed shut in Sara’s face, her hand still on the knob.   The action was punctuated by the sound of the door being locked, quickly followed by the dead bolt being pushed into place.  

“Well I guess she’s okay then,” Sara said.  

Months passed, and Sara decided to move back into Manhattan to be closer to her job. One morning while I was at work, she stopped by to pick up the last of her belongings.  While packing, she sent me the following text messages;

“Came home to pick up my stuff.  Guess who’s in our apartment…the neighbor.   Also, I want to take the shower curtain, so let me know when you get a replacement and I’ll come get it.”
 

It was classic Sara – known for burying the lead.  I sent her a flurry of texts demanding she explain how our mortal enemy ended up inside the apartment.  She explained that when she opened the front door to the building, she found the neighbor woman sitting on the foyer staircase. “Oh hello,” she said to Sara as she approached. “I live upstairs, and I seemed to have locked myself out.”  Sara was taken aback.  Here she was, face to face with the very same woman who had called her a cunt in this very same spot several months before, and the woman seemed to have absolutely no recollection of it.  Furthermore, she was alarmingly sober, which seemed strangely out of character.  Much to even her own surprise, Sara asked the woman if she’d like to come in while she waited for our landlord’s office to open.  She accepted. 

I made Sara list everything the harpy had done while in my home.  “Well, she sat on the couch while I packed.  I gave her a glass of water, which she drank.  And to go ahead and answer your follow up question, I’ve gone ahead and washed the glass and mixed it in with the others so that you will never know which one she used.“  As Sara finished packing, the neighbor thanked her and said goodbye, saying that she was going to see if the office had opened yet.  “The kicker,” Sara told me, “was that she told me that it was a shame we never got to know each before I moved out.”  Unbeknown to our Doctor Jekyll, we had come to know her drunken alter ego quite well.  

A few days later, I pulled up Facebook on my computer.  It took me a few seconds to realize that it had auto-signed into someone else’s account.  It took just a few more to realize that Sara had conveniently left out the part of her story where she let the neighbor girl use my computer, where she logged into Facebook and forgot to log out.  My immediate thought was to pull up her pictures so that I could finally see the eyes of the woman who had terrorized us from across the hall.   But of her 40-some profile photos, not one of them offered an unobscured view of her face.  I was living next door to Wilson from Home Improvement.   Then I started to realize the plethora of horrible things I could do to her account.  It was as if I was given a gift from Jesus with a card that read, “Punish this wicked woman, my son.” I spent weeks trying to devise the perfect revenge.  My friend Natalie suggested I set all of her settings to private, leaving her to wonder why no one comments on her statuses any more.  My friend Russ suggested that I photoshop each and every one of her profile pictures to make her look fat.  “Make sure to get the arms,” he told me.  “Women hate fat arms.”

And then several nights ago, I realized what I had to do.  I worked late one evening, and as I walked home in the dark night, I noticed the silhouette of familiar figure hunched over the front door of my buidling.  My heart started racing, realizing that I was only moments away from finally meeting the neighbor woman.  Confrontation seemed to be inevitable.  Panic set in as I got closer, and I decided to duck into another door well in the hopes that by some miracle she would just disappear.  I checked after a minute or so, but sadly it had not worked.  Weighing my options of hiding there all night, or manning up, I decided to brace myself for whatever alcohol fueled rage she was about to unleash on me.  

She looked up at me as I approached the door.  Her eyes were big and filled with sadness.  Her bottom lip was shaking.  She had the air of a frightened little girl.  As I pulled my keys out of my backpack, she put her hand on her heart. “Are you my savior?” she asked.  I don’t recall what I said, or if I responded at all.  All I really remember is struggling to unlock the door, the way you only do when someone is watching.  Finally it popped open and she scurried inside.  “Thank you!” she shouted after her.  “Thank you thank you thank you” she said the entire way up the stairs.  She managed to get into her apartment as I trailed behind her, and with one last “THANKS!” – that was that.  

When I got to my room, I went straight to my computer and pulled up her Facebook page.  This woman had called my roommate a cunt, and passed out on my doorstep. She had filled the foyer with garbage, had boyfriends terrorize us in the middle of the night, and left her cat roam hallway.   She had not been a great neighbor – that is a fact.  But the more I reflected on the situation, I had to wonder – have I always been a good neighbor? I mean, I sometimes let my mail pile up in the hallway and I’ve been known to blast country music when I clean the bathroom.  Hell, I just wrote a 7,500+ essay on what a giant bitch the woman across the hall is, and then published it on the internet.  So what – she’s not a good neighbor.  I can’t say that I’m a terribly great one either.  So I opened her Facebook page, and logged out without photoshopping double chins onto her photos or messing with her settings.  Being mean to this woman wasn’t going to make me feel any better.  We’re suppose to love our neighbors, but it unfortunately we have to love them all – not just the good ones – not just the young college grad and the lesbian bicycle enthusiasts.  Sometimes, just sometimes, some drunk bitches are going to move in next door, and dammit, you’re going to have to love them too.

Unfortunately I just came to this realization after publishing chapters I, II, III, and IV of this series, so please disregard everything mean you’ve read up until this point.