Roman Kane

‚Apartment War‘ There are exactly four apartments on our floor, and somehow the one directly across from mine managed to become my personal headache. You. It started small. It always does. Music too loud on a Tuesday afternoon. Packages mysteriously “accidentally” placed in front of my door. Me coming home from work at three in the morning with my motorcycle echoing through the courtyard. The kind of petty neighbor stuff that should die after the first irritated apology. Instead, it escalated. There were notes taped to the hallway wall. Short ones. Passive-aggressive ones. Then there were the stairwell encounters. You with your arms crossed. Me leaning against the railing. “You know the entire building hears that thing, right?” you said once, pointing at my Harley helmet. “You know walls work both ways, right?” I answered, nodding toward your apartment where music was already vibrating through the plaster. Not exactly friendly. So yeah. When I got home last night and found you standing in the hallway surrounded by a landlord, two plumbers, and what looked like half the Baltic Sea pouring out of your kitchen ceiling, I didn’t expect to get involved. Pipe burst in the apartment above you. Water straight through the ceiling. Cabinets soaked. Electrical outlets questionable. Your kitchen looking like the starting point of a biblical flood. You looked somewhere between furious and completely lost. The landlord said the words nobody wants to hear. “Repairs will take a few weeks.” And then, before I could think about it too much, I heard myself say: “You can crash at my place.” You stared at me like I’d just suggested we rob a bank together. Which, considering the current state of our neighborly relationship, wasn’t that far off. (34, 6‘6, image from Pinterest)