5:40am

It’s 5:40AM. I’m woken by the door buzzer ringing. Zulejka shoots into hiding (as cats do). I sit up in bed, groggy.

Damn alcohol-infested jerks! I lie back down. I live above a pub; sometimes revelers decide it’s time to ring ALL THE BUZZERS! (TM) in our building just for funsies.

It’s not funsies. It’s annoying. I just want my sleeps. I need my sleeps. Go away, idiot, I think at them (as if my thoughts possess any influence over the universe, much less its drunkies).

The buzzer keeps intermittently ringing. I decide to use the bathroom since I’m already awake. I can outlast this reveler.

It’s possible the reveler wants to talk like the one time a dude rang (also around 5am) thinking this was a hostel. [Me: “Dude, no.” Him, persistent: “I’m in room 116.” Me: “Dude, there aren’t even 116 rooms in this building…” Him: “But… hostel.”]

So. I’m sitting on the bathroom throne, and through the wall, I hear my neighbor in the flat next door moaning.

I feel you, I thought at him, I want the buzzers to go away, too.

Ring, ring. Our bells keep alternately ringing (I can hear my neighbor’s, too). But now I also think I hear drunken shouting from the hallway and decide I DEFINITELY don’t want to open the door. My neighbor and I share a small entryway / hall, and several months ago (also around 5am), some drunk dude bashed open the door to that hallway in a nighttime rage, thinking it was his door rather than ours. [Surprise! It wasn’t his. I opened my door the next morning to splinters of wood sprayed across the floor.] But that awful banging and door destruction in the middle of the night terrified Zulejka and me so much that I was certain someone was going to break down my door, too. It shook my sense of safety and made me leery of opening doors in the middle of the night.

The bell keeps ringing. I start wondering if it’s my OTHER neighbor buzzing (the one adjacent and across the hall who works on trains and gave me walnuts and strawberries [the selfsame walnuts that I stabbed myself trying to crack], the one who fell down the stairs and nearly bled to death but still went home to care for his sick father and buy groceries before going to the hospital, where the nurses called him mad. Maybe he lost his phone, I think, and he got locked out, and he wants to crash on my couch rather than sleep in the hall.

I have visions of opening my door to him lounging and inebriated in the hallway.

Then I think I hear multiple voices. Another thought occurs: What if there’s an emergency and these are rescuers and we need to get out of the building?

I get out my keys and unlock my door just as the shared hallway door bangs open.

In pour half a dozen firefighters.

I gape while the first few of them see me in my doorway and go wide-eyed (I’m not sure if it’s my wild hair or grumpy expression or the uber-short pajama shorts).

They regroup and ask where the old man lives. I figure they mean my neighbor, so I point stupidly at his door right beside mine.

They can’t get in; it’s locked. Apparently, firefighters don’t carry handy locksmiths with them. They ask which street my neighbor’s windows look out on.

Befuddled, I tell them the wrong one. Then my befuddled mind rights itself and, still befuddled, I tell them, no, his windows look out on the side street, same as mine. But am I right? my still-befuddled mind asks.

Dazed, I go to my window and watch the firetruck raise its ladder with two firemen on it. Only one of the firemen goes back down again (the other having climbed in through my neighbor’s window, I presume).

The firefighter who got inside must unlock the door, because I think I hear them talk to my neighbor (he doesn’t seem to be answering them, only moaning). I think they mention his daughter.

I presume they take him away.

Soon it’s silent. It’s 6:25AM. I shut and lock my door. I feel bad that I made the first responders wait 15mins while I was afraid to open my door. I am afraid my slowness might have killed my neighbor. Anxiety grips me. I can’t sleep. To calm down, I go on Facebook and make comments awake-Sonya would never make. At 7:38AM, I write work that I might sleep through my alarm.

I go to bed and try to sleep. I have existential thoughts. I randomly laugh.

Zulejka curls up in the crook of my arm to cuddle. I sing to her. [Hoomans, my hooman has awful singing voice! I had to purr loudly to cover it up and sheathed my claws in her arm a few times.]

At 8:53AM, I’m just slipping into a doze when my phone rings, dispersing all my hopes of sleeping again this morning. The building manager wants to know what happened to the neighbor, if they took him to the hospital.

“I think they took him,” I say idiotically.

Apparently what happened was that the upstairs neighbors heard my neighbor groaning from their flat, and THEY called the paramedics, who I guess couldn’t get in and therefore called the firefighters.

I hang up with the building manager and think: “When I heard my neighbor groaning, I just thought: I know, dude; those door buzzers are freaking annoying.”

I slog through morning stuff–cleaning cat litter, the morning work meeting (online)–and test a little, but braining takes work and my brain decides it would rather read bad book reviews.

12:40PM. Dudes in aprons (I think cooks from the pub-restaurant on the ground floor) come up to check that my neighbor’s door is closed.

13:05PM. The building manager calls and checks the neighbor’s door, too. He says it seems that the neighbor fell and couldn’t get back up 😦

So now, on a little over two hours of sleep, I’m trying to gear up to focus on work, but I’m thinking instead that I don’t want to live by myself anymore. All the solutions to fix that just require so much energy, though.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem. For now, I hope my neighbor is fine and I think the rest of us can maybe appreciate today a little more, knowing we are doing OK – or knowing that I faced some firefighters while I was befuddled and in my jammies.

Fun times.

Thrice the Shadow.

You all take care out there and appreciate the day.