You Gotta Learn To Coexist

I live on the second floor of an apartment building in a college town, so there are lots of young people getting their first taste of “the real world”.

My neighbor below me comes to my door one day.

Neighbor: “I need you to keep the noise down.”

I am confused, since I’m a rather quiet person, until she explains that the “noise” is from me walking around my apartment. She doesn’t appreciate how loudly I walk in my own home.

All the apartments have wall-to-wall carpets except for the first floor. I remember something my uncle once told me about how, if you don’t want to hear people walking above you, then you need to live on the top floor.

Me: “If me walking in my own apartment bothers you, you shouldn’t have chosen to live on the first floor.”

Neighbor: “I have trouble with stairs, so I didn’t have a choice. You just need to be quieter when you’re walking around.”

Me: *Politely* “I’ll work on that.”

And I shut the door. I am not going to alter how I walk in my own apartment just for her and her attitude problem.

Oddly enough, though, shortly after this encounter, I broke my foot walking down the stairs. I would be on crutches for six weeks with a cast and then have a walking cast for several weeks more after that. This made it difficult to move around my apartment since my crutches would get caught in the carpet.

I found that it was easier to sit in my desk chair and push myself around my small apartment with my still functioning foot and arms. However, again, the problem here was the d*** carpet. The wheels would get stuck in the carpet and would cause me the occasional problem. This meant I would have to hop around my apartment if I couldn’t get the chair unstuck from the floor. I could hear her complaining sometimes, especially when I had my balcony door open and she was outside. I honestly didn’t care about her petty problems, but I was tired of hearing them.

Then, one day, I was trying to push myself across the apartment to the kitchen and the wheels got stuck. I had just given the chair a big push, right as it got caught, and I promptly fell out of the chair and onto the floor. I didn’t land gracefully, and I ended up with a huge bruise on the back of my leg from landing on the armrest of the chair. Needless to say, I was not in a good mood and I was in pain.

My lovely neighbor came upstairs not too long after this and to complain that I woke her from her nap with “that loud bang,” I answered the door sitting in the evil chair with my broken foot in plain view. I politely told her that the “loud bang” she heard was my body hitting the floor. In my best sugary-sweet, sarcastic voice, I told her that I appreciated her concern for my well-being and that I was fine. I then thanked her for coming by to check on me and slammed the door in her face.

She never bothered me again.