nábúar

I've been getting more familiar with my neighbors.

I stepped out my door this afternoon only to realize that I was being coolly observed by a gray cat. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that my door (at least the door I mean to indicate this time with the phrase "my door") is on a upper floor of a building that does not permit the residence of animals. Keys still in hand, I regarded the cat and wondered just what his status was. A tourist, perhaps, visiting friends? Or was he an indocumentado? The cat regarded me back from his spot on the hallway carpet, not visibly put out but also not particularly friendly. Cautious. Apartment building hallways are strange spaces, after all, where the rules of social conduct can be a little hazy. I had somewhere to be, and I did not want to make awkward conversation that might have touched on my interlocutor's potentially illegal status (this would not have been neighborly), and so I made for the stairwell without tarrying (looking, I expect, like someone who had just run into a former lover in the grocery store).

The other neighbor with whom I have made a passing acquaintance is a large spider living immediately outside my living room window. The pane of intervening glass makes for an easier and thus more comfortable coexistence, though I am not sure that reflects well on me. The spider seems at any rate blissfully unconcerned about living in what amounts to a two-dimensional panopticon. I, for my part, am not anxious that my neighbor will be deported in dead of night, as the few centimeters between his abode and my own puts him outside the reach of the law.