Mr. Neighbor (not a date)
On Wednesday evening, I decide to take it easy and spend the night relaxing at home in my comfortable studio apartment. I’m not much of a partier, but I’ve been entertaining a thorough social calendar and I appreciate a little downtime.
As is typical, I finish up my work day around 6pm, so I figure I’ll prepare a candle-lit, solo dinner of roasted heirloom tomatoes and golden beets over burrata with a truffle drizzle and homemade baked garlic bread, take a nice relaxing bath and snuggle my clean, naked body in some fresh flannel sheets, wrapped up cozily with my kindle and latest book club selection.
I am drifting off at about 9:45, when I hear a knock at my door. Assuming it is my best friend in the building, Evan, I yell, “Who is it?” And when he hollers back, “It’s me,” I get up and start looking for some clothing. “Hurry up,” he shouts, when I am not moving fast enough.
Oh geez, I hope he’s okay. He knows I turn in early and he didn’t even text first to warn me he is coming over, which I despise because I feel it is an infringement on my privacy, particularly as a woman living alone in a big city.
I pull on sweat pants and a t-shirt and zip a hoodie up over it so he can’t see my nipples, and walk up to the eyehole in my front door. But it isn’t Evan. It’s Mr. Neighbor, a guy who lives upstairs and with whom I have some mutual friends from the East coast.
I open the door a crack and explain to him that I’ve been in bed, but he pushes his way through and past me, into my one-room bedroom/living room, where he plops himself down on my fancy, white, decorative chair, on which I do not usually allow guests to sit.
Mr. Neighbor is absolutely wasted and I am suddenly scared. He has a huge, unexplained black eye and he is going on and on about how he wants to hang out with me and how he knows I am so awesome and I have made such a cool “home” out of my small space and I should totally date a friend of his.
I grow progressively terrified, and as my eyes widen, he asks me if I’m “on Ambien or something.”
“No,” I reply, “I told you before you came in, I was just about to go to sleep.Now’s not really a great time for me – it’s late, so I have to let you go.” And I motion toward the door.
But he continues to have no awareness or insight of my feelings and doesn’t intend to move and I am suddenly flooded with emotion and anger. I try to discern the most polite, effective way to tell him again that I’d like him to leave, when he jumps up and screams loudly, “There is a mouse in your kitchen! Or a rat!”
To be clear, it is perfectly possible that there is a mouse co-habitating with me.I live on the first floor and this building is old and unspectacular, so I accept that rodents are not entirely out of the question. And even if there were a mouse, there isn’t much I am willing to do about it, because I strongly believe that falls into the “man duty” category and ONE OF THOSE DOESN’T LIVE HERE.
But it is more likely that he is on drugs and has hallucinated a creature and now I feel like I need to be even more careful and expeditious in extracting him from my place. Mr. Neighbor, I mean.
I suggest again that he might like to allow me to carry on with my plan to rest and he looks me dead in the eye and states eerily, “You are on drugs.”
No sir, I am not, but I would really like to go to sleep now and it is going to be difficult to do so with this insane amount of adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“It would be much more fun for us to chat in the daytime, when I’m not so tired, so I’ll walk you out,” I plead with him, but he probably knows we aren’t going to be friends tomorrow so he continues on a rant about our building and where I should live next and how if we band together, soon we can have it all.
This is so unfair. I want him to GO. How dare he make me uncomfortable in my own home. This feels highly inappropriate. It is a complete violation of my boundaries and personal space. He is essentially in my bedroom and I am in my pajamas and I did not invite his company. I keep asking him to leave and he is ignoring my requests and I’m more than slightly afraid that he has the propensity to snap and turn violent in an instant and I would not like to incite that behavior.
After thirty-two minutes of his interruptive nonsense, I am finally able to lead him over to the doorway. Another seven minutes later, he loses his balance while gesticulating wildly and steps back into the hallway and when he does, I quickly close the door and lock it.
“I wasn’t done talking to you, but let’s hang out soon!” He yells, and I burst into frightened, lonely tears.
I cry for about two hours because I feel certain that had a big, athletic man answered the door, Mr. Neighbor would have scampered in the other direction and never bothered me again. I am really tall, but I am still sensitive and vulnerable and I need to be taken care of in the same way a man might naturally feel the desire to protect a much smaller woman.
But instead, I live by myself, and my restful night has been totally ruined by a rude person’s desire to take advantage of the kindness of a mostly independent, but unfortunately, occasionally slightly helpless female, with an increasingly low tolerance for rats.