It was 10 a.m., my head heavy, my thoughts slow. The lingering fog of a sleeping pill clung to me like cobwebs. I stepped into the hallway, still half asleep, when Harry, my 83-year-old housemate, came rushing toward me. His eyes were wide with anxiety, his voice trembling in that irritating way.
“Are you expecting a package?” he blurted out, the words tumbling over each other.
Mornings had become a ritual—Harry would latch onto some new worry, pulling me into his web of anxieties before I’d even rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It was like he needed to anchor himself to my life just to keep his own from unraveling. Maybe I needed that from him, too.
We’ve been housemates for nearly 20 years. Time has a way of creeping up on you, sinking in like roots, binding two lives together in ways you don’t notice until it’s too late.
They say, “The days are long but the years are short.” Twenty years can blur into a lifetime, each day blending into the next. The wear and tear of those years is written all over us—in Harry’s face, in the circles under my eyes, in the way we move through the house like shadows. The difference between the ages of 63 and 83, between 24 and 44—it’s like an ocean between two different people, growing wider each day, filled with memories that may as well not belong to the same person.
I looked at Harry and remembered the man he was when I first moved into the apartment—full of energy, debating the news over breakfast. Now, he’s hunched, his hands trembling, his voice losing its edge.
But it goes both ways. The person Harry once knew is a stranger now. I used to have plans, ambitions, eager to carve out a place in the world. Now, I wake up to find the world has carved its place into me. What once mattered seems distant, almost absurd, while things I never considered now weigh on me like stones.
“No,” I said, shaking off the haze. “I’m not expecting anything.”
“This came in the mail,” Harry said, shoving a crumpled pink delivery slip into my hand. His fingers trembled, knuckles white with the pressure of his anxiety. The paper felt thin and worn, like it had been handled too many times. “It has both our names on it.”
I squinted at the slip, the letters and words swimming in front of me, blurring into a muddle of ink and paper. My brain was still sluggish, more asleep than awake.
“Were you expecting something?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice, but failing. My body craved caffeine, not this conversation. But Harry had been up for hours, turning his mind inside out over this.
He hovered close, breath shallow, like a trapped animal, waiting for me to make sense of it. His anxiety clung to him like a second skin, and I could feel it seeping into me too.
“My Benadryl,” he said, voice tight. “I need it for the itching. I can’t sleep without it.”
“Why don’t we just get it at Walgreens?”
“It’s too expensive at Walgreens,” he said quickly. “I found it cheaper online. But now there’s a problem.”
“When did they try to deliver it?” I asked, I was too tired for this.
“Yesterday. I was listening for the doorbell all afternoon. I thought I heard something, but no one was there.”
He started pacing, his agitation growing. I glanced at the delivery slip in my hand, dated July 27th.
“Let me eat breakfast first, and I’ll take a look,” I said, trying to buy a moment of peace.
“But I tried fixing it online,” Harry said, his voice trembling. “The package was returned because of ‘address unknown.’”
“Whose address is unknown, yours or the sender’s?” I asked, the question slipping out sharper than I intended.
He blinked, as if I’d struck him. “I—I don’t know.”
I could see the mess coming into focus, the latest flutter of a butterfly’s wings setting the day’s chaos in motion.
“Mine,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, as if saying it too loud might make it worse. “I think the landlady told the postman that I moved out.”
The words hung heavy. The landlady hated us—she’d made that clear. This was just another way to chip away at our last bit of stability. She wanted us out and enjoyed making our lives a little more miserable whenever she could.
This was how I got stuck with Harry. As the master tenant, if he got evicted, I’d be out too. If he died, I’d be on the street, maybe as good as dead. No matter how I looked at it, I was trapped. The city didn’t care—people were getting tossed out all the time.
I couldn’t afford to move. If I could, I’d have left years ago, before the landlady’s games took over my life. But I was stuck, and it felt more like a trap every day. My friends were already gone, lost their housing, vanished. The city swallowed them whole.
And now, this—one more thing.
“I’ll check after breakfast,” I said.
“Can you check the tracking number now?” he pressed. “It’ll only take a minute.”
I wanted to snap, tell him to drop it, fuck off. The words were there, but I swallowed them. He couldn’t let it go, not if he tried. His mind was scrambled from the start, worse every day.
In his twenties, he had a breakdown, ended up with electroshock therapy. He was in med school then, deep in the closet. He didn’t talk about it—maybe he couldn’t, maybe he didn’t want to—but it hung over everything he did.
In recent years, he’d grown terrified of EMFs, clinging to a handheld meter like a lifeline, obsessively monitoring the readings. I found it ironic, given his history with electroshock. He flinched at loud noises, sometimes shouted, the world too sharp for his nerves. He’d drift off, lost in thought. Every day was a fight against his past, against the anxieties that never let go.
He’d latch onto things like this—what most would brush off—and let it eat at him like lice until they were fixed, if they could be. But even then, the calm never lasted. There was always something else to worry about, something else to steal his sleep. His mind couldn’t hold onto peace.
“Fine,” I said, my voice tight with the effort of restraint. “But after this, I need some time to myself.”
I dragged myself to his old desktop computer, feeling that mix of frustration and duty. I pulled up the USPS website, hoping for a miracle, but the tracking page was useless. It confirmed a delivery was attempted but nothing more—no details, no timeline, no real answers. Just a vague confirmation that something was out there, lost in the system.
As much as I wanted to pull away from Harry’s anxiety, I was tied to it. My housing depended on it. The city was unforgiving, and I wasn’t getting any younger. And then there was Harry—what would he do without me?
“I don’t know,” I said, the words heavier than they should’ve been. “Let’s wait and see.”
Harry’s face crumpled like the delivery slip in his hand. This was torture for him, the kind of thing that gnawed from the inside out. He slumped into a chair by the bay window, clutching his EMF reader, eyes glued to the street, waiting for the mailman like a kid waiting for a miracle.
I retreated to the kitchen, poured coffee, made toast, and sat down, trying to shake off the tension. The summer light outside the window felt familiar. My mind drifted back to my childhood- those long, hot days in Southern California in the ’80s—thick smog, relentless heat, dry, endless days under polluted orange skies.
My parents were always at work, leaving my sister and me to fend for ourselves. We’d raid the cupboards for cereal and sugar, washing it down with Crystal Light while binge-watching soap operas—Days of Our Lives, All My Children, General Hospital. My sister took those storylines to heart, analyzing the characters like they were real people, their lives tangled up with ours. It made her seem older, wiser, like she knew something about the world that I didn’t.
One day, we found a bottle of Benadryl in the cabinet. These pills weren’t like the stuff now—they hit hard. We started taking them for fun, popping a few before heading to the mall, riding the bus like two pre-teen zombies. The mall’s air conditioning was our only escape from the heat. I remember gripping the escalator, trying not to pass out, while my sister moved through the shops with an eerie calm, like she belonged, like this was just another script she’d learned.
In high school, things changed. She traded soap operas for something sharper. Speed became her story, pulling her miles away from the person I knew. One night, she came home spun out, pounding on the door like a banshee. My mom, her face tight with worry, told me not to open it. So I didn’t.
I stood there, frozen, as my sister screamed, threatening to kill us. Her voice echoed through the house. Then it stopped. I heard a car door, an engine, and she was gone, swallowed by the night. The silence was suffocating. My mom sat in the dining room, silent. I tried to lose myself by watching MTV, but my sisters screams played on a loop, louder than any music video I could find.
I snapped out of it and finished my coffee, decided to take a walk. I needed air, space—anything to shake off the feeling that the walls were closing in. Harry would be fine for a while. The sun was shining, and it was one of those days that should remind me why life’s worth the trouble, the kind of day you feel guilty for not enjoying. Kids played in the park, their laughter carried on the breeze like a promise. There was life out there, and I needed to be part of it, if only for a little while.
I grabbed my sunglasses and stepped outside. The world felt brighter, sharper. A row of expensive cars lined the curb by the neighbor’s place, gleaming trophies of tech money that dominated this city. The cars sat like polished monuments to wealth disparity. Sunlight glinted off their surfaces, fresh bird shit splattered on the hoods. I passed a woman walking her yapping terrier. She gave me a tight smile; I nodded back.
As I turned the corner, something caught my eye—children’s clothes scattered in the bushes, hanging like forgotten ornaments. A tiny sock dangled from a branch, swaying in the breeze like an abandoned flag. Nearby, a small, faded shirt lay crumpled in the dirt, half-hidden by the leaves. I paused, trying to make sense of it, but the scene resisted explanation. The clothes looked almost deliberate in their placement, as if someone had arranged them there with care, or perhaps in a moment of desperate urgency.
I continued down the street, the image of the scattered clothes lingering in the back of my mind. The children’s laughter from the park echoed faintly, as if coming from another place. The birds, usually a background hum, seemed to chirp with urgency, their calls sharper, more insistent. Even the breeze felt tense, as if it carried whispers that I couldn’t quite make out.
I took a long loop around the neighborhood, each step heavier than the last. By the time I returned to the front steps of my apartment, I saw a mailman—not the regular one. This guy was younger, wiry, with a neoprene brace on his left elbow and then one on his right knee. His eyes darted, as if the mailbag might escape his grip.
“Any mail for me today?” I asked, pointing to my apartment.
He sifted through his cart, quick and mechanical. He handed me a stack of mostly junk mail. “Here you go,” he said, voice flat, already onto the next stop.
“What about my housemate? He’s waiting on medication.”
The mailman glanced at the stack, shook his head. “Don’t think so. I’m just covering today.”
I thanked him and went inside, sorting the mail. Flyers, credit card offers, bills—all junk. Then my hand stopped on an envelope from the attorney. There was a tracking number attached to it. Then it hit me. The delivery slip that morning had nothing to do with Benadryl. My chest tightened as I opened the envelope.
The letter was brief: they got my documents, but it was too late. The deadline had passed. There was nothing left to do.
The words were lifeless, like the decision was made long ago, and I was just catching up.
The letter was thin, but it hit like a brick. The landlord was moving forward with eviction, claiming we’d made “unauthorized alterations” with the plywood flooring in the attic, put in when her dad still owned the place. A flimsy excuse to break the lease and hike the rent. She’d been waiting for this, and now, with a new law firm, she thought she found her ticket.
I knew we could fight it—probably win—but it would take more time, energy, and will than I had left. I’d spent too many years here already, fighting. Now, I’d have to jump through every bureaucratic hoop, gather every scrap of proof, just to show that those “unauthorized alterations” were basic repairs—the ones her drunk father refused to do himself.
If only I’d gotten those papers in on time.
I dropped into a chair, the weight of the letter pressing on me. Sunlight streamed through the windows, but it felt dimmer now, as if a cloud had passed over. I looked at Harry by the bay window. He hadn’t moved since I left. He didn’t notice me come in and sit down. He didn’t notice that the mailman had already passed. He didn’t notice the letter in my hand, either.
I watched Harry, pity twisting into something sharper. I wanted to say something, but the words stuck in my throat, caught between what was true, what was bitter, what was kind, and what was inevitable.
Harry kept staring out the window, like the answers were out there somewhere. Each moment felt like a thread unraveling, no matter how hard either of us tried to hold it together. I sat there for a long time. Maybe hours.
A dog barked, sharp and loud, breaking the stillness. Harry flinched but didn’t turn away, his hands trembling slightly on the windowsill, EMF reader by his side. There was nothing left to say. The sun dipped lower, the day fading, but we were still there. That had to count for something.
I stayed a little longer, then got up. It was time to make dinner. Harry would be getting hungry.
How did I get here?