An apartment in Geneva
There’s a man nearby my apartment that sleeps standing up. He’s outside a wonky hotel, his hair in a low ponytail and a fag burning between two fingers. Trams pass him, traffic passes him, people walk around him and still he doses on.
How fucking dare he, I think, lose consciousness so easily as waves of nausea leave me unable to stomach anything, particularly the day ahead. He comes to mind at stupid hours, when it feels like the night is offering respite to everyone except myself. My heart races and I consider putting my coat on and trying to sleep outside.
This is what every insomniac tells you not to do. Look at the clock, fixate on how little sleep you are getting, type out your feelings on a Word document and email them to people you vaguely know. The more you fret, the more you will fret. Thoughts go round in a loop. It’s not me, I insist, my head on my pillow, it’s the apartment. Before I blamed the job.
It runs in my family, to live in buildings with character. My parents are constantly fighting damp and all the other ailments that come with an old house. We are used to walking across floors that sigh. I chose my home for its extravagantly high ceilings. Enormous windows. Weathered woodwork serving its purpose over a century later.
But there’s another man who smokes that clouds my living space. I am in Europe, after all. He’s a relic too, living in the building for over thirty years, the corner of his door black having never opened a window in that time. Certainly not in the last two that I’ve been above him. Trust me, I’ve checked.
Because he is my obsession. I walk through my front door and inhale. My winter puffa is my dressing gown as I try and air out the flat, playing music over the hum of a redundant purifier. I know how he’s feeling based on the quantity of the smoke, always prolific, often worse around pay day. When I travel, even my suitcase carries his stale breath. I smell him on my clothes.
I’ve asked every other neighbour about him. I made the plumber a coffee once so I could ask him too.
“C’est horrible,” he told me, shaking his head, “the walls are grey and peeling and it’s full of flies. I don’t know how anyone can live like that.”
This is like crack for my overactive imagination. Through our shared walls, when I’m awake in the night, I can also hear him snore.
It is very easy, in a sleep deprived state, to focus solely on the bad. I also live in the centre of town, so noise is inevitable. There’s a pick-up spot nearby. My letter box is bent where someone tried to break into it. The radiators make me jump when they clang. I take the bins down into a cellar that emulates one in Dracula’s castle, fearing murder every time.
Yet there are quirks in my quotidien, in my everyday life, that I’ve become weirdly attached to. The guy who goes to the shops with a ginger cat on his shoulder. The market over the road every Sunday. The sunsets I’m gifted over the Jura mountains. The hot baker who gives me a wink. Even the man who sleeps standing up.
I cling on to these details as my home, which hasn’t always felt like a home, is telling me to move on. It’s ironic how hard wired we are to resist change. I have a new routine with a new job in a new city. I am at peace and my body feels lighter. But as it moves through this transition, I’m already nostalgic for the apartment I will leave. That housed this chapter in my life that is closing, even though it wasn’t the happiest.
Sometimes, I run into my downstairs neighbour in the lift. At my most spiteful, I tell people he looks like Argus Filch from Harry Potter. Although unlike Filch, he always smiles politely and says bonjour.
“Bonjour Monsieur,” I mutter back, trying not to breathe in.
I can’t look him in the eye because faced with him, I confront the reality that he’s just a sad and lonely man. That there is no monster under my bed. That if I turn the light on and look under the covers, the source of my unrest disappears.
It wasn’t the job, it’s not the apartment, it’s not the man who smokes downstairs. Moving homes won’t help me fall asleep any faster. Letting go of what could have been just might.
