The Past

My work likes to start us late but that also means giving us out lunches at 4, like we’re in bohemian Barcelona instead of soul sucking North America. As least North America prefers to let their employees work from home. I leave my office and enter the living room. It doesn’t feel different or look different from any other day, but today there are two packages wrapped in brown paper. I open both, and they’re batteries for a laptop that I don’t even use. I was going to disregard both packages until I saw a URL for a song. Oh God. I got someone trying to link me their Spotify songs.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6qI0MU175Dk2DeoUjlrOpy?si=990bf90ae3564998

I type up the link and the title of the song is “You’re a Fraud.” The artist is “Local Cops.”

The sound file starts with a voice of a robotic guy. “You have presented yourself as someone with a moral high compass. You have done this for the 11 years, cultivating a small yet online presence. You preached peace even while other preached riots. You are everything this country is against and that you’re a fraud.”

I only have a thousand followers on Twitter, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. But the file continues.

“911, what’s your local emergency,” an operator asks.

“I’m ai 81 Smith Forest Boulevard,” a voice, a woman is giving out my address.

“How can I help you?”

“You’re getting really violent,” the voice pleads to a third party.

The third party finally speaks up. His voice is faint since he seems to be far away. “I’M TIRED OF YOUR SHIT!”

“Please stop,” the woman pleads, and screams as if someone is hurting her. Every scream seems familiar.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? WE DON’T NEED THIS SHIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.”

“We’ll sense someone immediately ok,” the operator said, trying to comfort the woman.

There’s a minute left in my lunch hour and I have to pretend that everything’s ok.

…

It took me a whole day to process it, and maybe talk to my family about since it does concern them. I do have to book off work so that I could tell them the whole story. If I could do it today I would but that’s not how the real-world works. I’d have to ask for a day off work, and my supervisor’s telling me that I have to swap that day off with someone else.

I’m in my bedroom which is basically doubling as my office, a room that has its many stories. This used to be my mother’s bedroom, the bedroom of the woman wailing on that mysterious tape. Where’s the tape that shows the time when she piled a bunch of stuff in front of my door, and I had to call the cops to get out of my bedroom? The tape where I had to pee in my bedroom because she wasn’t letting me go to the bathroom? Where were those tapes?

I loved my mother, I had to, but she did a lot of stuff that wasn’t right. Things that made my dad finally leave but couldn’t take us with him. My sister, who she locked out on the balcony during winter for hours, finally left. The only people left were my mother and I, and she was nice most days, but she would drive to anger. I worked, but my money went to her. I tried taking my stuff away from the apartment bit by bit, or find a man to marry me but none of those things worked.

Every surface of this apartment has a story of pain. But only she got to express hers and tell everyone her side of the story. Some of her relatives knew about our side, but most didn’t. I don’t know who sent the package, if it was one of them, and if there are more to come for me to face what I did because she couldn’t.

…

The past will haunt me but not today, not yet. I split time between getting shit done since I don’t have work and watching Youtube videos and ignoring my work group chat.

There’s also my roommate’s cat who likes to go out on hallway walks occasionally. Today was one of those days when one of my neighbors have packages from Amazon. At least that’s what I thought until the cat got closer to it and I had to grab him. It’s the same package with the brown paper wrapping that I got a few days ago. It’s the same size and everything. I picked it up, thinking it was for myself. I tore out the wrapping like a vulture and I used my nails to get to the tape, which wasn’t easy.

The door opened.

“That’s not for you,” my neighbor said. I never cared enough about him to get his name.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t know what I was thinking,” I said as I looked for the cat, making sure he didn’t get into this guy’s apartment. Thank God it didn’t.

“You and your roommates are strict about people staying away from you, but you take away people’s shit!”

“I’m really sorry, it’s just the one guy,” I said as I walked back to my apartment. I looked back and he was still outside. I walked back faster in case he was going to follow me.

Let me tell as quick of a story about that guy. So the original person in that apartment was one of those self help ladies who also didn’t believe in vaccines. Coincidentally she left town when people started getting sick, leaving her apartment to that guy and one other roommate. The reason why he said that was because he tried to get into the same elevator ride with us but my one roommate stopped him.

“Really,” he said during that time.

And now I AM taking his shit. The past few days has warped me.

…

I don’t know how the conversation lead Qalid and I to this thread, but we were walking, and he said something about “We don’t really know anyone, really?” I agreed. I wonder what he’ll think of me had he known me outside of what he knows. If he knew why I was the only person in the apartment, and what happened in the room that he’s sleeping in.

He just thinks of me as a walking meme at this point. He thinks a year of living with me is enough for us to get to know each other.

“Anyway, what happened to the elevator guy? I haven’t seen him since that incident,” he wondered.

He said this after our walk led us back to our building. He’s had enough of going outside. It rained on us a little bit, making us move a little faster, but of course it stops spitting when we get back home. I still felt restless because of everything that’s happened recently. I told him I haven’t had enough steps yet.

“That’s so weird. I’m usually the active one,” he observed.

“I guess today’s the day that I outdo you,” I said with a dead laugh, which weirded him out.

“Aren’t you going to be tired. You have to go to your sister’s today, and she’s gonna work you out.”

“I’ll be fine.”

It didn’t take long for him to walk in when the Elevator Guy’s roommate came out from another door in the building. I usually don’t talk to strangers, big old adult me, but something about the past few days changed.

“Hi, I’m the guy on 215. One of the guys.” How did I lose my skills when it comes to person-to-person conversation?

“You’re the guy with the cat?”

“It’s my roommate’s cat. Anyway, how’s your roommate?”

“Oh, don’t get me started. He just got up and left and I have to scramble to get someone else new.”

“You at least have some of his deposit money.”

“Of course, and I have some savings, but it’s like money is water, you know?”

“True. Well, I got my roommates from Facebook and Kijiji. I’ll ask around too,” I replied, which she thanked me for, blankly.

There’s something about knowing that that guy’s not living in the building anymore that threw my mood off. It made me want to walk back up to my apartment. It didn’t take seconds until the second rain started pouring. A text also came in on my phone, directing me to a link on Amazon.

It was a video this time.