The People Upstairs

Every morning at 4:30am, the ceiling above my bed begins to creak as the person living upstairs gets up for the day and starts moving around. I don't know who gets up at 4:30 to go to work, but apparently I have the good fortune of having one of these people living right above me. My building is post-war (I think), and it's all like "charming" wood finish and parquet floors, so I'm not surprised that it makes noise when you step on it. But what I don't get is how much this person moves around between 4:30 and 5:30 (when they seem to leave). First the sound is focussed right over me, so in the bedroom I'm guessing, but then for the next hour there's one set of creaks which move heavy, back and forth, from the bedroom area to the living room area, as if this person is just walking non-stop, for no particular reason. To the living room, to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the living room, to the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the bedroom. Oh my God. It's ridiculous. Then separate from this main, louder noise, there's some weird scurrying sound that has to be some sort of pet (even though you aren't really allowed to have any, which means it could also be a scary crawling child monster) that creaks lighter. It moves on its own, apart from the main creaking, but also goes back and forth through the entire apartment for an hour.

Somehow I used to not be bothered by it and it didn't wake me up. But I guess since I'm older I'm becoming a lighter sleeper and now unless I wear earplugs, I'm up for an hour before the sun rises, until this person gets the hell out of their apartment and goes to wherever it is they go to in the morning. I'm just so damn curious to see who it is, but as always seems to happen when you live in an apartment building, I very rarely see anybody else entering or leaving. It's only in the hallway that I hear the occassional sounds, the opening of a mailbox or the walking up of stairs. When I first got here, I met one dude and thought "oh, this is going to be different than Manhattan because people are more social." Really, after that guy, I never met anyone else. Just now when I was getting my mail, there was a woman who walked in at the same time and there was this little awkwardness of us being neighbors who don't know each other. At one point, as I was turning my key in the lock, I looked back at her to be all like, "oh hey, you live here?" But she was already walking up the stairs and not noticing me. Interestingly enough, I got back to my place and the person above me seems to be home, so maybe she's that person? That would have been good to know because then I could have asked, "what is it that you do?" and "do you own a small rodent or are you in possession of a child that crawls?"

Still, I can't say it's as bad as my last apartment building where I gave every neighbor a holiday card, wrote my apartment number when I signed them, and never heard back from anyone. Not a peep. I kind of feel that if I went through the trouble of doing that here, at least a few people might get back to me, invite me over for dinner, set me up with their cousin(s). You know the drill. Neighbors are freaking crazy.