My new mum neighbour isn’t home from hospital yet. I keep going over to visit her but she isn’t home yet. I heard from her boyfriend that the child and youth protection team may not let her take her baby home with her. I’m not sure quite what is going on there, but I’m not entirely surprised either. I wonder how thats going to go.

A few hours later her boyfriend calls me and he is so drunk he can only barely make sentences. He is trying to call a number at the hospital and it isn’t working. He’s really distressed and I manage to persuade him to leave it for the morning when there will be staff around. He calms down and we say goodnight.

My other neighbour comes to the door during that call. “Come over when you are finished, i have some things i have to tell you about” she says. I haven’t seen her for a few days, so i decide to indulge her for a few minutes. I go to her place and she fills my ears with vitriol directed at her mother. She is angry that her mother broke into her house and stole some of her things (ie came in and cleaned up while this neighbour was in hospital). She is particularly angry about an antique mop bucket from the nineteenth century (ordinary metal mop bucket with the squeezy mop thingy) that her dear friend who died (the previous tenant of my apartment - he used to padlock the gate to prevent chats such as these and the constant requests to “borrow” this and that) gave her (actually I loaned it to her), which she could have sold on eBay for $2 million (hehehehe), that her mother threw away. She is considering suing her mother. She is also angry that her mother dares to ask her to repay the money she “borrows” and wont feed her anymore. I feel for her mother.

This neighbour craves company but, as you can imagine, she finds it hard to keep friends. She meets an endless string of young men and women with similar problems to herself, but things usually don’t end well. This neighbour is fortunate in that she has stable accommodation, something the people she meets often don’t have. They sometimes try to move in with her. She tells me a short story about some difficulties she had with a young man who tried to move in earlier this year, and finishes the story with an offhand comment along the lines of “Of course, he didn’t rape me, no-one ever rapes me. Anyway….“ and my heart sinks a bit. I had suspected that such things happened. I already knew about the levels of denial she is capable of. An opportunity arises and I manage to extricate myself from her monologue and apartment.

As I close her gate I look back around the green space and there is an Irish wolfhound standing between the trees, watching me. My heart falls again. His owner recently tried to move in with this neighbour, and more recently with new mum neighbour. His owner is currently staying in a backpackers nearby while the dog sleeps outside in our park. He cries at night, kinda loudly and very sadly. I wish he had a good owner to take care of him. I wish he didnt keep me awake.

I’m saving up my money, saving up a deposit for that house in the ‘burbs. Oh how lucky i am to live in my little apartment, and oh how hard I’m saving.

• Kristen (Tokyo) said on 08/08/20 at 07:29 AM.....

  I’ve been wondering how things were going with the neighbors. Sounds like it’s the same-as-usual. Somehow I had hoped they would all wake up “fixed” one morning and everything would be well. Of course that isn’t how it goes.

• T (Tokyo) said on 08/08/20 at 01:01 PM.....

  Lots of saving incentive in this post.  Will be good to have your own space free of boundary-challenged neighbours.

• j-ster (work) said on 08/08/20 at 01:23 PM.....

  Yeah, there is lots of savings incentive. I think its actually a bit more chaotic than normal at the moment. I find it really hard to shake the “this is fixable” mindset too. On a regular basis it hits me that these people’s problems and lives are simply not fixable. I guess when you consider a normal distribution curve then thats to be expected, but when you are living in a group of apartments located right at the end of that curve, its a real eye opener. I work with people whose job it is to find some kind of solution at this end of the curve, and even these experienced, thoughtful and resourceful people say that there are no easy answers.

• MJD-S (Exhaustion City) said on 08/08/20 at 04:45 PM.....

  Oh hon none of this sounds very relaxing. There’s community… and then there is Dante’s Seventh Level of Hell….

• j-ster (Work again) said on 08/08/22 at 09:19 AM.....

  Heh heh, true. Hell is other people, or so Sartre said….  But you are right, this is not the community i was hoping for.