Empty Spaces

Well, it’s official now. Yesterday at 4 pm, the duplex we’re living in was signed over to the new owner. Only a few short hours later, I could already smell the pungent aroma of cigarette smoke leaking upstairs. I still don’t know anything about this man, other than he’s a smoker and when he spoke to us seems to be kind of a loony. Hell, I don’t even remember his name, so I’ve just been referring to him as “Smoky.” There hasn’t been any moving of furniture going on between then and now, yet he clearly spent the night in the downstairs of the duplex. I don’t know on what furniture he spent it, so maybe he just curled up in a sleeping bag. It was easy to hear footsteps walking around downstairs, the droning mechanical noises of household items being turned on that hadn’t been turned on since February, and the more obvious yawns and laughs and smells that come along with having a downstairs neighbor.

I can’t exactly figure out why, but I’m having trouble convincing my instincts that this man is not an adversary. I feel very defensive about him having a key to our place and the ability to know when nobody’s home and I feel very anxious about having to communicate with him day-to-day. I keep telling myself it’s alright, but I just can’t shake that feeling that he’s an “opponent” somehow and I’m developing a kind of brooding contempt for him. It’s very unsettling, since this is an emotion I don’t feel very often.

My last few weeks at work have been a massive challenge for me. Each project involves me spending several weeks creating it, then it gets sent out to the other departments for a while, and then returns to me to put the finishing touches on it. I started almost two years ago and the projects are all supposed to be done with a little more than two years from now. So for the entire month of May, I’ve had the perfect blend of new stuff that I’m still building and old stuff that’s in the process of coming back to me to fix. It’s a very stressful feeling to finish one thing only to discover that three more have come back from out of nowhere. By the time I finish those, I have even more.

The good news, though, is that Lia and I have found a new place to live. Due to a conflict that arose when giving our notice, we find ourselves having the entire month of June as an overlap to move into the new place. I would like to get another look at the place before I go about describing it. Further details will be provided in the future.