To start off, let me describe our apartment and why 'window' is a swaddled in those beloved quotation marks. I shall set the scene for the next year of my life here. Our apartment, my boyfriend Bryan and I's, is in an ideal location. We are right outside of Harvard Square, minutes from the T, and a few steps from hip bars with names like 'The People's Republic' and 'Daedelus'. There isn't just one type of restaurant around, say Italian (sorry North End, but you are a kind of one note type of deal), but a plethora of feeding options at just-found-out-how-much-you-owe-on-your-student-loans prices. When Bryan lived in the North End, paying 25 bucks for a basic pasta dish got old fast. Almost as fast as it took me to gobble up the miniscule portion seated in the middle of the enormous white plate.
So... great area. A location that just feels smart - even the bricks feel like they have an intellectual edge on me. And due to this spectacular location, and rock-bottom priced-eats, space is perhaps at a premium. Thus, our apartment is quite small. It has really high ceilings though, so much so that I'm thinking about investing in those suction-cup shoes that men like Tom Cruise wear in Mission Impossible just so I can use all that excess square footage soaring above me.
You enter the apartment, and there is a small corridor, (with really high ceilings of course) with a bath of the right (which has sweet black and white tiled floors - they look a bit downtrodden, but I still enjoy them). You walk down the corridor, and you enter the living room. To the right is a small small kitchen, to the left is a bedroom that faces this little side street that is adorned with very angry 'NO PARKING' and 'VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED 24/7, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK' signs every three feet. The street is quiet, save for the caravan of garbage trucks that arrive every morning from 6:30 to 7 to empty the big blue metal dumpsters across the street. Two windows look out into this street and let in a marginal amount of washed out light.
The two 'windows' in the living room, and one in the kitchen, face a three foot wide alley way, and then an ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS brick wall.
So in the middle of the day, with no artificial lights switched on, our apartment looks like night. Or, if you wish to be more fanciful, like the Bat Cave, complete with Christian Bale hiding in the closet.
One perk of the 'windows' is that is really quiet for the location... It feels so hermetically sealed that I worry that I could be stuck in this cathedralled ceilinged dark Bat Cave, surrounded by flames that were not detected by our ancient and yellowed smoke detector, two stories about my head, and no one could here be scream and claw at the filthy 'window' screens that face the alley way. Christian Bale can't even here me from his hiding place in my shallow closet. So, it is very quiet, unless two men decide to take a leek outside your kitchen at 9:30 on a Friday night.
Those who know me I'm not the wily type - I don't punch the clock on Friday evenings then promptly pull out a handle of vodka and pound a few shots while still at my desk. I come home, grudgingly go for a run, maybe I cook, I read, I usually stalk on Facebook, I do dishes. I get lazy as each hour passes. Bryan doesn't get off work till 11, so I generally use the time to unwind and do nothing entirely productive. Other people are probably so rip roaringly wasted at this point that can't find a bathroom in the bounty of cheap eateries in the area in which to release their liquor infused golden stream.
So I'm clanking around the kitchen, cursing the pile of boxes that are still unpacked behind me, and I hear:
"You duuuuddee... if you don't tell, I won't...."
And then a pee-sound. Not like a chimey tinkling noise, but the sound of a stream of urine, perhaps about half an inch wide, pounding the sad and dark brick face of my building.
"You loookkth out feeerrrr copsth. Thats all wee got to worreeee about ferrr now."
"Okaay." A duet of heavy piss resonates in the narrow alley. The piss, and their voices, seems amplified after so much quiet.
I suddenly feel a little scared. They sound like the are right outside my window. What if they heard me clanging around, though I was a copsth and proceded to pee their heavy stream on me in a frantic get-away tactic reminiscence of a skunk? Or, what if they lean drunkenly to their right, come into the 'windows' frame, see me clunking around and decide to kidnap me? They'll evict me from The Cave, cast iron pan in hand, and force me on a pub crawl with other co-eds! We'll go to cool and hip-named bars and do the provided shots! All will be lost of my thoroughly nerdy Friday night!
I slink into the living room, where I wait for Endless Piss Symphony No. 2 to end. It does, eventually, and I hear some stumbly noises, and then, quiet once more.
I sit for awhile, then I go to our black and white tiled bathroom, drop the shorts, and make a little soprano tinkle of my own.
