I’ve begun to worry about my upstairs neighbor. At first his hacking was annoying. It reminded me of the Chinese woman and man I rented from and lived with in Chinatown. They used their whole body to clear their throat, always, after they brushed their teeth. The man living above us makes the same noise but to the nth degree and all day long. I first called him our bulimic neighbor. Now I’ve begun to suspect he wakes up every morning wanting to kill himself. He swallows a lethal dose of some poison you can find in the cupboard—a thousand apple seeds, a cup of holly, some herb—and then changes his mind. He spends the day sticking his fingers down his throat in an attempt to live. The hacking slows down around 3 and picks back up at 8, though to a much lesser degree. This is the final round, a final clearing, just to make sure—and perhaps this is more a survival instinct than a conscious decision, because when—he does indeed wake up the next morning; he curses every finger he put down his throat the day before, every single one of yesterday’s hacks. The torment. Hopefully he’s just a drug addict trying to get better. Whatever his marathon hacking is a product of, the sounds disturbs me. I play music to drown him out from a playlist called sci-fi scapes. But his chest must be deep shades of purple and blue, and his teeth eroded half way to his gums.
Sometimes, most of the time, maybe only sometimes actually because these moments tend to be transcendent, I think that things are the only way they could be, and these moments the way they are were destined ever since, well, I could never know. For example:
Yesterday I bought a table. I woke up in the morning and decided to bike, and because we are furnishing our apartment I decided to bike to a used furniture store. I walked around the warehouse a few times in circles, and then saw the table. It was stacked atop another one in the middle of the store, and it gleamed. I ran toward it, and for maybe 30 minutes I traced its legs with my fingers, fingering the peels and dents in the wood and becoming more and more nervous... I become apprehensive when I like something very much. After too long of my perverted groping an Eastern European grabbed the table's pretty legs with his big hands and said I think I’m gonna take this one. My face fell and I gasped. He took his hands off and said good. You’ve made your decision. I hugged him tightly.
I can’t describe the table to you. All I can say is its round, the movers took its legs off to get it in my apartment, and I’m sitting at it now as I will every day from here on out. Each day I don’t I will be sad, but still I will thank it (God?) for letting me look at it and choose it and bring it home with me. I feel this way about people I love, loads of things I keep in my room, and the job I found on craigslist. I like to think I can tell when a thing is placed firmly.
I dream each night of sagas, and the characters are the people I miss most. My dad, a, s, i. But life is very good. So good c and I went to breakfast, to a hotel, which is my favorite place to eat breakfast. A woman drank a latte and ate a salad alone and slow, and we talked about what material our husbands would be. I said wool. She said steel. The man upstairs, from what I can tell, is made completely of very, very fine paper.
