Jasmine Nicole

Do you know what’s mysterious? Neighbors. You could live next to someone for any amount of time and never know them or even see them.

There was this quote, either from tumbler or Twitter that said something about the fact of, ‘we know we live in a matrix because you never see your neighbors bring in groceries’. Not going to lie but it bugged me out for a second because I never saw my neighbors with groceries. Now I am a pretty reclusive person so I usually don’t hang around enough to run into any neighbors, so that theory didn’t last long for me.

The most mysterious part about neighbors is the noises they make. You may never see them, or talk to them, but guaranteed you will hear them. I’ve lived in an apartment complex for almost 6 years and was in a college dorm before that for 2 years, and some of the noises I’ve heard still stump me.

This noise is the saddest but to this day, I am still confused by what was going on in that house. I used to live next to a family with a baby, and the baby used to cry for what seemed like hours and no one would soothe the baby. The baby would nearly cry until it was hoarse from screaming. From the sound of the cry, the baby was young. Possibly no more than 8 months old. I never saw the baby, never heard them except for when they cried, and if it wasn’t for the crying, there was no clue this child even existed. I don’t even remember ever seeing the people who lived in that apartment. That wasn’t odd because I was in college at the time, and I spent a lot of time on campus and when I wasn’t at school, I worked the second shift at a hospital.

When someone did respond to the crying, it was almost, always a man. He would yell, scream, and from what I could hear, he had almost hate and disgust in his voice for the child. So many nights I would wake up and hear the baby, hear the person yelling, and it would break my heart. I had to stop myself many times from getting out of my bed and going across the hall to help the baby. But I didn’t because I didn’t know what was going on in that house and so much could have been going on. The mom or dad could’ve been sick or had postpartum depression. Maybe the caregivers weren’t the parents.

The people in that apartment never lasted long. In the two years that I lived there, I feel like it was at least 3 to 4 different sets of people who moved in and out. All of who I made it my business to ignore. But I honestly think of that baby every so often, and I just hope they’re ok.