Currently viewing the tag: "neighbors"
After you’ve been single for a while, and the only reason you leave your apartment is to buy more Lean Cuisines, you start to realize just how significant your daily interactions become. Community is essential, something you can default to: a network of relationships that are effortless to maintain. The only requirement is that that you keep doing what you already do, and frequenting the places you normally visit. It’s really a beautiful thing.
For example, I’m pretty tight with my cashier at Walgreens. We say “what’s up” when I walk in. And, I have loads of friends at the gym–whenever I show up there they smile and say, “haven’t seen you in a while” when they swipe my card. The people at Intelligentsia know I take my iced coffee with ice without me even saying anything — just a little perk of being a good neighbor. And the homeless guy on the corner, we keep a watchful eye on one another: I keep tabs each time he falls off the wagon, and he gives me shamed looks when he sees me on my second ice cream cone of the day.
I may be single, but I’m not alone.
But my Boo is an entirely different relationship. Boo [Radley] is a transvestite who lives alone in my apartment building and never looks up. I can only assume this is an attempt to hide her ginormous Adam’s apple. She wears immaculate white Keds and has poofy black hair, which she sometimes covers with a felt hat.
I once tried to hold the front door for her when she was getting her mail from the mailbox. She just slowly turned her head sideways, looked at me with vacant brown eyes, and shook her head. I ran upstairs and locked the door.
This morning I saw Boo outside. There is something terrifying about bumping into her in closed spaces like the elevator, but there is something even scarier about seeing her in the wild. I could only assume she had left her apartment to kill someone, so I ducked around the corner and sped up to catch the #135.
As the bus opened its doors, I saw Boo turn the corner, with her chin tucked to her neck and her unmistakable shuffle. For the first time, I felt bad for the tranny. But then, she cackled in my direction, jammed her finger up her nose, and scampered down the alley.
Maybe we could be friends, after all.
