This was a paper I wrote and turned in on February 8th. I personally think it needs a lot of work. It sounds childish and plain, but I had decided to use my first idea and expand it into a short story. I had to turn in something, so this is it.
It was real, even the television was still on, and loud. It was so genuine it chilled him that he was listening in, cup against the wall silently praying for more clarity. Thin walls as they were they had become suddenly adept at concealing specific verbs and phrases. As he quietly stood, ear against the cup against the wall, against the television against the yelling he felt compelled to keep listening. He felt like this was a piece of knowledge he must know and keep and take into the grave. He realized there was something so fascinatingly mundane about the whole ordeal, but he could not stop. It started thirty minutes ago. Paper thin apartment walls left little to the imagination when it came to the sound of a tyrannosaurus rex blaring from Dolby Digital downstairs. He had always wanted to pump it all the way up but that immature brat Shannon upstairs wouldn’t have it merely remarking, “The pots were rattling.”
Of course they were all a little immature, living across the street from a university, but it was this immature companionship that gave him the impression that sound was a communal commodity. The techno sound would bounce the heavy beats through the walls and he would become the music prophet. It turned out Shannon was no disciple, and would come downstairs repeatedly to remark his video games were causing hell upstairs. Laughing at the metaphorical thought of war causing secretarial hell in heaven, he would shut the door and complain that Shannon was 23 going on 40, but would still turn it down. Ryan next door showed little complaint as he only would comment on who was singing in the shower and would guess what movie was on last Monday. It was only assumed that he adored his sound.
Thirty minutes ago at 6:00 PM he firmly grasped exactly how thin those walls between him and Ryan were when the argument commenced. It was a low comment, and while he was reading for next week’s history night class, he began to put the book down after the comments grew louder. It wasn’t a dinosaur roar but more like the techno music, the slow build up until the shits and the fucks were so loud that it had reached some club in Europe. In those five seconds he could not help but grow intensely interested. He ran to the kitchen, grabbed a plastic cup, and hurdled the coffee table as he softly placed the cup to the wall and then the cup to his ear. Garbled and broken he had to sift through the sounds of the large television blaring and the chatter. It was obviously between Ryan and his girlfriend, and it was more brutal than expected. He tried to visualize some boxing match as each volley was some wide strike. While the woman placed short but well placed jabs, Ryan was flailing madly. He was loud and boisterous, and although he was dominating in volume he was having a meltdown. He mentioned a world that he could not provide. He confided that if she could not love Ryan like this, then there was no reason to continue. He hated her little planning.
“Our relationship”, he yelled, “is not some fucking list you check off on the refrigerator.”
All she could do was remark softly. For all he knew Ryan was “winning” the argument if that was possible. By the first ten minutes it already seemed like nuclear end war as both sides showed no concern for leaving fresh geography. It was real, he thought as he listened in. Real like the way his parents fought when he was young. He would listen in on those too. At least one room apart he would listen for the echoes in the kitchen as he would fluctuate up and down the stairs as they moved. His mother would yell her mid life crisis and his father was the counter-attack. It was always the counter attack. Now he could not hear the counter, but as usual the louder of the pair could not sense it. Ryan was infuriated. At one point, he thought the fight had become physical when a pause sounded like movement. In hindsight, he concluded Ryan had moved to the couch.
It felt so human. This wasn’t just some television show or novel sub plot. It was his neighbor, nearly gagging about how he could not stand his girlfriend’s obsession with her projected life in her upper-twenties. Ryan’s speech was ruthlessly efficient. He was cutting in every respect, and he did not care how she felt. He hated it all: the pale sense of love she didn’t show at the end, her inattentiveness to the world around her, her constant desire to plan everything. It was all a show, and it was dying before the curtain call. He listened as Ryan was saying things so real and so volatile that it infected every charged particle in his body. After twenty minutes it only intensified as he nearly pushed his ear completely flat against the bottom of the cup.
What was it he hoped to find in this argument? He was never attracted to Ryan’s girlfriend. He was only an acquaintance of Ryan himself. He could only guess that his fantasy was nothing different that something in an Alfred Hitchcock movie: something different enough to be a curious event. If he could see into an office building at night he would only catch mundane events of copies made, computer typing, and crumpled papers thrown into trash bins, it would only be incredible because it was inconspicuous. Wasn’t that what reality TV was for? In the beginning wasn’t that something so true it exploded into every single documentary life style available? There was something different about this: they were not on television. It’s what made people watching so appealing to him. As Ryan complained about his wish for a life he did not have, he had no idea a cup was on the other side.
Thirty minutes now. He was shocked to hear that Ryan had finished, ending with the absolutely clear statement, “we’re done.” It was bold, and decisive. There was some argument afterward, but there was nothing so dramatic as the conclusion at the thirty minute mark. By thirty three minutes she was gone. Two minutes after the television was turned off, he could hear a guitar reverberating from the room. He removed the cup from the wall and replaced it in the cabinet. He paced several times before finally sitting down on the couch. Whether it was three years without a relationship, time alone in an apartment, or the empty life of a job he did not want and classes he did not want, he firmly concluded that he actually wanted what just happened. It did not matter that it was a fight that blasted the thin walls. It did not matter that it was so decisive that she stormed out and Ryan played guitar. It mattered to him because it was something there to grasp. Like some poem, it was a pessimistic cry for help. He was inwardly pleading for some form of feeling. It was a tangent hope for a life transcendental to watching television, or reading magazines. An argument like that, he thought, could only arise after a firm understanding of life together. He missed that. He almost felt compelled to enter some relationship just to cry as it fell apart. He would burn the house down himself. He would construct the hope of a life lived strongly only to bring it down on him and some poor woman who had no idea she walked into a burning building. He leaned forward, and rubbed his eyes as he peered at the residue on the coffee table. He was 21, and no one had left that kind of residue on his life. Before he could firmly grasp what that meant, he silently opened his history book, and read about imperial China.
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