It wasn’t until the new neighbors moved in that we realized just how paper thin the walls to our apartment were. They moved into the apartment to the left of ours, which had been unrented and of no use for some time.

The old man who lived alone to the right of us hardly made a sound, and the only time we heard any real sign of life was when his son would visit to prepare him food for the month, leaving everything organized in containers and zip-bloc bags in the fridge.

The son’s visits were announced each time by the roaring of a food processor, and his departing marked by three sturdy knocks on our door, to ask us how we were and if we heard or noticed anything strange or unusual about his aging father.

For the most part, we lived in the company of our own noise and no one else’s.

We had been living together for over a year now—for both of us being the first time we were ever really serious about anyone in our lives. We moved in together during our final year of school with the help of student loans, some meager savings, and the unimaginable variety of odd jobs we took on: telephone operators, baristas, English and Spanish tutors, environmental activists, even pizza delivery service… We were caught up in love and all of its vanities, so it was easy for us to forget the sound emitted by the world outside of us.

When the new neighbors moved in, a stage of our relationship had ended, a stage that was characterized by silence and ignorance, filled with all sorts of premature dreams and musings.

To this day, we still grieve our simple days of quietude.

***

Our new neighbors were an older couple in their late forties or early fifties. They looked relatively healthy and stable. An ordinary John and Jane. They were always composed when we ran into them in the hallway or elevator, but the fact of the matter was that they were producing the most awful human noise.

It took them about a week to settle in. We concluded that their new surroundings created the illusion of change and clarity, but it was only superficial, so after a week’s notice, they retreated back into their usual skins.

The mornings were usually quiet. Just the rumbling of car engines, sometimes you could hear indistinct murmurings or fragments of conversations, but nothing unusual or extraordinary. The mornings were not polluted by unnecessary passions, but rather, they were protected by the effects of yesterday’s fatigue and the inescapable sleepiness that comes in the morning when waking up to go to work.

They would both usually get back home around five or six, which coincided with my schedule, making me the first accomplice to their suburban discontent. I would tell my partner about their conversations after she came home from work. They would argue about the most ordinary things, like misplaced keys or simple remarks about the day.

I started writing certain parts of their conversations, most of it was petty or inconsequential, but they did have moments of reason and lucidity. I can’t tell if there is any value to these fragments or if they only seemed true or important contrasted by all the other trite utterings that had resounded through our walls. Sometimes things only gain significance by the mediocrity that surrounds them.

I thought of these few sayings as bedroom adages or cosmopolitan aphorisms, or sometimes, I simply found one of their utterings inherently poetic for one reason or another.

Here are the transcriptions listed in no particular order of interest, with no editing on my behalf:

Five Proverbs for the Unintentional Voyeur

* “You come home late whenever you feel unwanted.”

* “The spaghetti is cold and untouched.”

*“My past should not hang over you as if it were your own shadow.”

*“You forget whatever lack of memory conveniences you.”

* “You should never go to sleep feeling so wounded.”

***

We felt terribly guilty. We shouldn’t have known these things. These were their secrets, even if infrequently they burst with revelation. This knowledge was unnecessary though, and we highly doubt that the neighbors were even aware that we were so well versed in their affairs.

How could we take back all the words we heard? Did they not realize how words, from an image or thought, turned into sound, pushing air from the lungs into the vocal folds, to articulate meaning?

Our silence, was discreet and unobtrusive. It did not mark history, but rather, left room for something else.

©Scarlett S. Diaz 2025