Previously, in the
looming death of my flatmate ‘L’:
2/23/2025
3/3/2025 3/7/2025
4/5/2025
My flatmate ‘L’ is wasting away with some fatal disease, so he’s moving out. I’m not broken up about it, because he’s mildly nuts, psychopathic, and he’s put me under orders never to speak to him. It’s not difficult. I prefer not speaking to him.
It’s been a month and a half, though, since he told the landlord he’d be out by the middle of the month, and the month was April. We’re well into May, and he’s still here. Still moving out. Still dying, with more and more frequent coughing jags, and now there are puke puddles on the porch that we all suspect came from ‘L’.
If he’s moving out, move out. If he’s dying, die. All I ask is, get on with it already!
We share a boarding house, where there are supposed to be four people, but there are six — L’s mother and brother are always here. I can’t come into or go without seeing ‘L’, or his mother or brother, and without hearing too many conversations with ‘L’. No conversations with me, certainly, but ‘L’ and my other flatmates, Dean and Robert, often chat in the kitchen, where thanks to the crazy acoustics of the house, every word comes into my bedroom like they’re standing over my recliner.
Last night, being neighborly, Dean made dinner for everyone, and invited me — thanks, but no thanks. ‘Dinner for everyone’ means Dean and Robert and ‘L’ and L’s mother and brother, all five of them talking at the kitchen table for two hours. There was no escaping it through my thin, plastic bedroom door until I turned on brown noise at max volume, but even the brown noise couldn’t drown out the stink of veal parmesan.
L’s boxes of stuff are always piled in the front room, and when the piles disappear, more piles replace them. Swear to golly, I’ve seen his mother and brother carry more boxes out of his room than could conceivably fit into his room. It has to be trick photography.
Every few days, his mother parks her station wagon in front of the house, and his mother and brother fill it with L’s boxes and clothes. ‘L’ is too weak to help much, so he sits in a chair and coughs and supervises. When the station wagon is full, his mom drives it away, then drives back for another load. Endlessly, infinitely, and right now, they’re carrying out boxes, more boxes — always more boxes, but his room never empties and ‘L’ never leaves.
Damned near every time I emerge from my room for a shower or a sandwich, ‘L’ or his mother or brother are in the kitchen, or in the living room, or carrying out boxes. I’m so very tired of saying nothing to ‘L’ as we pass, but there’s nothing to be said beyond nothing. He wanted silence, he can have all the silence in the world. Silence is beautiful, but absence would be better. When will he be gone?
There’s nothing amusing about the dying man and his family and his boxes, and yes, I’m a horrible person, absolutely. I don’t particularly want ‘L’ dead, though I won’t cry when it happens, but I do passionately want ‘L’ and his boxes and his mother and brother and the coughing and the puke puddles on the porch to all be gone, as promised, by the middle of last month, please.
5/10/2025
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