I sat with my coffee in the cold morning air and watched nothing happen for fifteen minutes, and it was, in its quiet way, deeply satisfying.
But I am not going to tell you that’s where the story ends.
Because two weeks after the management company letter, something else happened.
I came home on a Thursday afternoon to find a note in my mailbox. Not from the management company — a handwritten note, on a piece of paper folded once, with 3B written on the outside in handwriting I didn’t recognize.I took it upstairs and opened it at my kitchen table.
You could have just talked to me, it said. I would have stopped. You didn’t have to go to management.
I read it twice.
I folded it back along the crease.
I found that I had a number of responses to this note available to me, ranging from the reasonable to the considerably less reasonable, and I sat at my kitchen table for a moment deciding which direction to take.
Then I got out a piece of paper and wrote a reply.
It was brief.
I did talk to you, I wrote. Twice. The first time you said you’d stop and didn’t. The second time you told me I was lucky it was tea bags and shut the door. I’m not sure what additional conversation you were hoping for after that.I’ve lived in this building for eleven years. I signed for your packages all last winter. I try to be a good neighbor. That goes both ways.
The tea bags have stopped, which is all I was asking for from the beginning.
I put it in an envelope, wrote 4B on the outside, and put it in his mailbox on my way out the next morning.
He did not respond.
The tea bags did not return.
That could be the whole story.
In some versions, it is. The complaint, the documentation, the administrative resolution, the note, the end. Neighbor mistreats neighbor; neighbor responds systematically; behavior stops. Clean. Proportionate. The appropriate use of available mechanisms.
Ezoic
But the thing about living in a building for eleven years is that you are not operating in a single transaction. You are living in an ongoing relationship with a community, and communities are messy, and the people in them are more than the worst or best thing they have done.
