Won't you be my neighbor?

I'm sitting here in the slightly cold darkness of my apartment. Typing away on an assignment due tomorrow when my ears perk, suddenly, to the sound of crunching. I pause the Pandora's Box music playing on my computer and wait. There it is again. It's loud, like walking over a bed of potato chip bag crunch. Persistent and random.

Is it possible that I have a rodent? Maybe a gremlin found its way out of 1984 and into my apartment? I quietly rolled my desk chair so that I could look out of my bedroom door. No potato chip bags. No furry anything.

Nope. It's hail. Yup. Hail against my window. And it's late April.

But all worrying over guests got me thinking about my neighbors and how I have NO idea who they are. I'm not even sure what they look like. I have had a regular 9-to-5 schedule, a weirdo college schedule, even a lazy weekend schedule and yet I've barely seen hide nor hair of my fellow 428ers.

The girl across the hallway from me leaves funny little presents outside her own door. Yesterday it was a brand new bike. The week before that, an outdoorsy water bottle. Sometime ago there was a pair of flip flops that seemed to be making themselves right at home. But that's about it.

There was that one time we had an exchange, if you can call it that. It was an equally crummy day one Sunday a few months ago. I made the ill planned decision to do my laundry, which, on a Sunday, can get nasty, dirty even, with only three washer and driers and 100 some-odd residents.

So I brought my sack out and down the skeevy pesticide-smelling nether basement to find that all the washers were already taken. There was one tall brown haired girl taking one wet tangle of clothing out and putting another dry heap of clothing in. I left my sack on the one table and went back to my apartment. I did this two more times before a washer was open and each time the brown-haird girl was down there. Passing between washer and dryer and packing seemingly endless loads of dirty laundry into one coveted machine.

But something became available, I packed my crap in - whites and darks, there was no need to drag this on - and returned once again to my apt. An hour later I made my way back down, past the half-squished cockroach, to the laundry room to find my clothes washed and the brown hair girl STILL at it. I threw my damps into the dryer and mentioned that my machine was now vacant if she wanted to put her, what, 85th load in. She smiled, I smiled and went on my way.

Anyhoodle, I eventually, thousands of hours later, picked up my hot clothes in a bundle (I forgot the mesh sack and dropped a few socks on the way home) and made my way back up my three and a half flights. When I'm just two steps away from the top who do I see coming out of the apartment across from mine? The brown haired laundry girl!

I let out an audible gasp. She turned (presumably to return to her life's work in the basement) and I said "Hey!" She looked at me as though I had eight heads. I tried another route. "I was," and I motioned to the heap of still-steaming clothes in my arms, "doing laundry...and well, you were..." still nothing on her end I might add.

I tried another route. "I'm Lauren." "I'm Amy," she said. And that, my friends, was the start to our non-existent relationship.

I'll be sure to keep you updated on our stimulating silences from across the hallway.


xoxoL