On Loss

My former downstairs neighbors were troubling, at best. When my husband and I first moved in to our Atlanta apartment, we met the folks living directly below us when our cat escaped and made a run for the parking lot. We chatted with them briefly, not enough to determine anything of any real depth about their character. They seemed nice. She had a quick smile, he was the nervous type. But I thought they were nice. Normal. Shortly thereafter, their epic fights began.

Our downstairs neighbors were prodigious screamers. From about 7pm onward, they would loudly fight and I once jokingly said to my husband “Say what you will, their projection is impeccable.” I was unable to joke one night, though, when I heard the woman downstairs screaming for help. I was alone in the building. I called the police and met them outside in my pajamas. The cops knocked on their door, they said everything was okay, and the cops left. They postponed the rest of their argument until the next night. Neither of them ever called for help again.

A word about where I live… My apartment building sits on a hill in a “neighborhood in transition.” It’s what we could afford at the time and it’s an old building with old building problems. Our building sits at the melancholy confluence of owl calls and train whistles. On some nights, it’s tempting to howl along with them, especially when the wind blows in, cold, under the door, around the window frames, through the walls… It’s a place where you are startled by your downstairs neighbors’ arguments, but you are not surprised. When flooding covered the city in brackish waste-water, our building sat above it, untouched. It was almost as if Providence had declared that our sad little home needed no insult to be added to its injurious existence. It is not a place for living. Unfortunately, I found that out.

When I was offered this contract, performing on a cruise ship, it seemed like an almost comical reversal of fortune. I would trade my cramped, sad apartment for a brightly colored ship and endless sea vistas. I wouldn’t have to listen to people screaming their mutual hatred at all hours of the day and night. I would trade a damp, dreary, depressingly gray little life for work and sunshine and relative calm. I left my husband behind me, on land, but even he said, “You have to go. You have to.”

A particular kind of amnesia set in when I boarded. It’s happened to me before: working someplace where the scenery is lovely and I am given the chance to do what I love for a living makes me forget that I have any kind of life other than the one I’m currently experiencing. I don’t call my friends. I don’t email or write or read newspapers or give a damn about the world outside the cocoon of my job. It’s like with each touring job I have a chance to be, if not reborn, at least given respite from the myriad stupid concerns that I pile upon myself.

When the ship arrived in port in Los Cabos, Mexico, I followed my friends to a seaside resort with free internet service and two for one margaritas. Under similar circumstances, who WOULDN’T be affected by the amnesia I described? Who wouldn’t feel that their lives and possibilities were expanding? I called my husband from the resort, stuffing guacamole and chips into my mouth like I was storing them for the winter, and settled in for what I imagined would be another pleasant , uneventful, conversation. My amnesia didn’t last long. My husband told me that one of our downstairs neighbors had died. She had collapsed two days prior and couldn’t be revived. She was a young woman with what appeared to be an unhappy marriage and a wreck of a life. She didn’t deserve to die like that: in that box of an apartment, its walls suffused with anger, with the owls hooting outside.

I went home for a month in the middle of my contract and was told that her relatives were there until the autopsy was concluded and her affairs resolved. On the second day I was home, it started to snow and I came home one day to find all of the remaining belongings from her apartment out back by the trash can, slowly being silvered over with snow. The remains of her life. Of their life together. The end of a marriage, to be thrown out with the trash. I heard from another tenant that, just prior to her death, our neighbor had asked if the tenant would help her get away from her husband. Her life was a wreck, apparently, because he had made it so. He was a junkie, unemployed, prone to tantrums and unfaithfulness. I never saw her family. I never got to tell anyone how sorry I was or ask if I could help or even make a damn casserole and she never got to get out before the wreck caught up with her and pulled her under.

I think that now I will always picture loss and sorrow the way I saw it in the middle of a late-winter southern snow storm: unwanted things, covered in snow, waiting to be carried away.