That Time I Lived In A Duplex

Dear Internet,

Sorry for my absence. I was going to wait and write once something definitive had happened but I missed you. Nothing definitive has happened. The only thing that has changed from when I wrote this, is that there is a new fish and he might be dying. Yes, I'm serious.

THE house is stuck in a twisting labyrinth of paperwork and federal regulations. The possible baby is still just possible. And Malcolm died to be replaced by Felix, who is trying to die as I write this. And not because I am a horrible pet owner...apparently he has terminal constipation. Again, not joking.

SO, fuck all that. I don't want to talk about it anymore. Instead, let me share one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. Doesn't that sound like good times? Okay, here we go:

Once upon a time, R and I were dating. A few months into our relationship, R went to Italy for 5 weeks with his roommate, a trip planned before we had gotten together.

While R was in Italy, I moved into a small duplex. Before moving in, I was told all about the other occupant of the duplex, a woman my age who owned a dog. However, as I was busy pining for R's return, I never got around to walking the whole 8 feet over to her front door to meet her. Also, my motto at the time, cultivated from other past experiences, was to do my best to avoid neighbors. At any rate, I hadn't heard her yelling or playing loud music, and the dog wasn't barking non-stop, so I hadn't had a pressing reason to go over.

The weeks slowly crawled by and then the day finally arrived. I drove to the airport to pick up R and his roommate. We stopped by R's house, threw his roommate out of the car, and sped to my new place. Once there we proceeded to make up for lost time. Repeatedly. For the next several days, stopping only to eat and shower...and the shower might not have been the clean kind either.

Several days later, after a vigorous session of reuniting, we lay cuddled together in my bed. And then there was a sneeze. Not a particularly loud sneeze. In fact, a rather lady-like sneeze. The problem was that it had not come from me or R.

We turned to stare at one another in horror. Had we just heard my neighbor sneeze?!? Was it an aberration? It turned out that it was not. The next morning, we sat in my living room listening to EVERY word the neighbor said as she talked on the phone.

Later that same day, I was walking out to my car and the young woman who lived next door came up to introduce herself. It seems that she was also on vacation while R had been out of the country and she had returned the same day he had! Which is why I hadn't heard her before his return, and we had been to, umm, busy once he was back to realize that the walls dividing the duplex were paper thin.

I was so embarrassed by this first impression, and what she most certainly heard, that I never spoke to her again. The end.