I hate my upstairs neighbor, but at the same time I hate him

There are things I particularly like about Paris. The multitude of places and people to meet, the surprises – good or bad – on every street corner, for example.

And then there are things I hate. The smell of permanent pollution, the billions of pigeons and, above all, the whores. From. walls. In. paper. Those same walls that let even the slightest creak through and that led me into the strange spiral I know today. The unworthy spirala girl who wakes up one day and realizes she is stalking her neighbor.

Not long ago, I was still the best neighbor

You must know that sharing a wall of a building with me, even if it is made of paper, is a delightful experience. I have impeccable taste in music, my cat never meows, and my love of books and carpets would turn any clamorous apartment into a padded cell.

Unless you want to be heard, my untimely hum therefore never reaches the ears of my sweet neighbors on the floor, and the sound that comes from their house enters rather muffled to disturb me.

Yes but.

There are several flaws in this lifestyle. The first, is that my audio patch does not include the ceiling. The second is that if my neighbor upstairs, like a capitalist ascetic, lives with only a gaming PC, an iPhone and a speaker placed on the floor for all material goods, my Billy shelves clearly won’t stop his sessions from playing howl IN ALL THE ROOMS OF MY HOUSE. ALL TIME.

But I digress.

Before Covid my life was peaceful

When my partner and I moved two years ago, our apartment was idyllic. Bright, well located, extremely affordable – it had everything one could hope for in a rental property.

In these blessed times, all left their apartment early in the morning and returned home late at night. From my neighbor upstairs I only knew the intercom number and profession (“ in finance »), for having vaguely crossed paths with him during a power outage. I saw him sometimes early in the morning, in costume, and we exchanged cordial greetings, before going on with our lives. like the strangers we were.

We were living happy days, until the arrival of Covid.

On the night of March 16-17, my upstairs neighbor made a decision that would turn our lives into a nightmare: he decided not to give a fuck anymore. Not at all.

First discovery: my neighbor rejects furniture and the concept of time

Memories of those early days of confinement are blurred and the change is difficult to describe as it was gradual. But with the entire building now under house arrest, I’ve discovered two things.

The first is that I heard absolutely every micro-noise coming from my neighbor upstairs.

The second is that this discovery had an explanation: this one seemed not to possess no furniture. Zero. If I know, it’s because I began to be awakened at any time of the day or night by vibration noises that woke me up with a start, thinking it was the alarm clock that stood about 30 centimeters from my face.

It was actually my neighbor’s laptop, sitting on the floor, vibrating on my ceiling. All accompanied by a sound of alarm to turn the Wednesday sirens green with envy, and with an infinite echo. I realized I was living below the equivalent of a station hall, with no off-peak hours.

The first night it was 4am and I politely assumed he had an emergency. The fourth night it was 2:45am and I tried to dig a hole under my boyfriend and cat so I wouldn’t hear a thing. The eighth night in a row, it was 6:03 and I cried.

At the same time, this being without furniture or decorum was destroying my sleep hours with methods worthy of the CIA for a week.

My neighbor decided to drop everything to break into Twitch at night

In the first days of this difficult confinement, life went on. I slept then between each of his untimely alarm clocks – which began to ring even during the day, at incongruous hours – I worked on a thousand and one projects, and I tried to overcome these oddities because at that time no one understood what Covid was anymore.

Of a very hypochondriac nature, I didn’t feel like breathing in my neighbor’s miasma (remember, we didn’t even have masks yet), and I was trying to convince myself that I was overdoing it. Especially since I was the only one in my family who suffered from broken nights, my life partner was a very heavy sleeper.

A glance at the facade of the building allowed me to notice that the peasant had neither rods nor curtains and was hiding from the sun with sheets stuffed in its windows, which confirmed the hypothesis of the minimalism of his furniture. I was wondering: what was happening in his life? Is he a robot? Is he a spy? Were you testing a new productivity method for a LinkedIn post?

It was then that the screams began. To my dismay, the sound signals were very clear: my neighbor had discovered Twitch. He had started streaming and was trying to reach a very specific segment of the platform, the insomniacs and people who live in the time zone furthest from ours.

My neighbor becomes my nemesis and I live in hate

Every night at 11pm, my boyfriend and I would stare at each other with broken hearts. A tinkling sounded from the speakers glued to our ceiling and the howls began. I was woken up by “AH L’BATAAAARD” and other jokes at 3, I knew when he was losing, when he was winning. I understand that the boy never slept and that I was probably living under a vampire’s nest on amphetamines. Sometimes during the day I could hear him slamming doors.

But at that moment the world was turned upside down, and we didn’t dare go and tell this person, who evidently lived alone, that everything in her life hated us. After all, everyone is handling this pandemic as best they can.

We have chosen to take some time for ourselves, out of solidarity. Big mistake.

Gradually the cries multiplied, at any hour of the day or night. My boyfriend and I then realized that the man upstairs had probably quit his job, yet the 5am alarm kept going off every day, including the weekends. The guy didn’t come out, he didn’t move and… the alarm kept us both awake staring at the ceiling.

“We still talk a lot about the neighbor, right? »

After two months punctuated by our neighbor’s follies, without realizing it, this had become one of our main topics of conversationto me and my wife.

Let’s face it: there was nothing we could do, we were locked up, and even if my cat is the best of all, there aren’t a thousand things to say about him. Every day, deprived of escape, we sighed that maybe it was time to go hit him, before sighing again that we were lazy. Every morning we would compare the time and way we were woken up by his bullshit.

I complain about him in each of my whatsapp conversations. I tell my cat about him. I tell my mother about him. “I want to kill my neighbor” has become my leitmotif. I see my boyfriend is going through the same dive into cerebral nonsense as me: François of the former became our nemesis.

But from love to hate, as we all know, there is only one step.

Slowly the neighbor becomes the third man of my couple

And when our hatred for this person took over, we realized one thing: from this person, we heard every day noise. Footsteps, clicks, the slightest vibration of the phone. But we never heard him talk to anyone.

In the blink of an eye we went from exasperation to concern: this poor kitten cries all the time, never leaves the house and visibly lives without ever sleeping. What if he needed help?

We didn’t realize it, but by this point we were already grown up chills. Where any rational human being would decide to go and tell Jean-Michel on the first floor to shut up and buy a carpet, we hesitated to invite him for coffee to discuss his mental health.

Thankfully, summer has arrived, and with it a graceful phase of denial. This was combined with a common bout of unemployment for my boyfriend and I, and we took the opportunity to go for a walk with everyone we hadn’t seen in 6 months. It was hot, we were far from Paris: sometimes we spoke of the neighbor from hell as a distant memory, laughing and imagining that he might move when we returned. Poor us.

After Twitch, my neighbor discovers Tinder

As the truces are short-lived and as of 2020 the world is a joke, we were reconfigured about 4 seconds after returning home.

Driving home one evening, I saw him at the front door of the building, introducing himself to a person who is clearly a Tinder date, and who was walking up to his house. Régis having not replenished during the summer, we listened to every second of the first 15 minutes of the date which obviously was going very badly, before starting a film why not abuse it anyway.

And that’s where everything changed. Why’in real life, we spent more time commenting on her date than watching the movie. At the same time, even through a parquet floor, the embarrassment was so palpable that it would have been a shame not to joke about it, eh, for once we could laugh a little.

Despite ourselves, my man and I become stalkers

I’ll spare you the details of what my life has become when my neighbor replaced Twitch with Tinder, you can imagine that was extremely unpleasant. Desperate, my boyfriend and I amassed 78 egg cartons to stick to the ceiling, before realizing it was useless and we were getting totally unstuck. Now I have a hundred egg cartons I don’t know what to do with… But that’s not the point.

Time has passed and the very idea of ​​facing Jean-Michel on the first floor has become inaccessible. He’s been ruining my life for a year now, yet I haven’t been able to go upstairs and hit him, or at least ask him politely to lower the decibels.

Because even if I hate this stranger who ruins my life, she seems to have developed a strange affection for him, a Stockholm Syndrome neighborhood. As if being forced to share his intimacy has turned him into some kind of obnoxious roommate who can’t be hurt, or an annoying family member.

It seems I met someone, and the other day my boyfriend issued a ” Ah, I’m happy for himhe seems to be doing better “.

When I hear him coughing through the partitions, I worry for him and hope he’s okay.

Sometimes it’s not there for several days. And to say we miss it would be a big exaggeration, but let’s face it we note its absence.

After all, you can really hate someone who just decided to follow their dream: live off sex and video games, not caring about the neighborhood?

And especially, can you really hate the person you know best in the world, since he apparently decided not to hide anything from us?

In short, the time has come to move.

Photo credit: Tachina Lee / Unsplash