What Happens in The Ellington

So, I look out my window a lot. 

Ever since I moved into a 10th floor apartment with a balcony, I’d say half my time in the room is spent staring out into the building across the street. Before you think I am an absolute creep, I would like to clarify that I am reasonably normal person and that I don’t get off by seeing the old man that lives on the 16th floor walking around in his underwear, I don’t obsess about the Asian kid that joins me for a cigarette on the 3rd, and I don’t spend hours filming the spastic cat that’s been this close to death about 16 times. But, I do look out into their building a lot. 

As a matter of fact, I believe there was actually a creep looking into my apartment at some point. Again, I swear I’m not a nut case. Let me explain. 

It was sometime around the lovely time of 3am one Monday night when I stepped out of bed and put my computer aside to go smoke a cigarette in the company of the city view. It’s really great to take that break because for some reason, at that time of night, the city is static and all you can hear is the occasional late-night taxi gliding by. 

Anyway, I looked straight forward and as my eyes were gliding down the polished glass windows of my neighboring building, I saw a bright red light shine. I squinted my eyes to try to make out where that little light was coming from. The curtains of the apartment 2 floors above the one parallel to mine were closed covering the entire floor-to-ceiling windows. But wait, there was a box on the bottom of the window. A black box, impossible to distinguish at that time of night. I finished my cigarette, secretly waiting for the light to shine again so that I didn’t feel like a paranoid stress-case, but nothing happened. I closed the curtains and waited for the next day to come. 

I woke up and went back to the same window, coffee mug in hand and looked into the apartment again. Differently from most of the other rooms with curtains drawn to let the sunshine in, this one still had it’s curtains pulled down. Except for that black box. I looked at it for a long time but still couldn’t figure it out, so I pulled out my own camera (it has a 10x zoom OK?) to take a picture of the box and see what it was up close. Turns out it was a cardboard box with a hole cut in the front of it, covered by a piece of dark transparent paper, kind of like those overhead projector sheets. Inside the box, distinguishable by the contour of the lens, was a camera. My reaction follows:

“Oh my God, they’re taking pictures of my building at 3am! Holy shit! I walk around naked all the time, I have people over, my curtains are never closed, and my entire apartment front is glass! They probably know what time I wake up, what time I sleep, what I do! Oh my God, I am going to die…”

I breathed. 

“OK… they might be working on some sort of project that involves taking pictures of the skyline at regular intervals so that they can make a stop-motion animation video of the city’s sunset and sunrise, right? No? Maybe too far…”

I couldn’t decide. 

After telling everyone I came in contact with within the hour following my troublesome incident, there was semi-consensus that I shouldn’t be worried. I was going to wait to see what happened and keep my curtains closed. 

Turns out that the next day, I heard through elevator chatter that a woman a floor below mine was followed by a man all the way home wearing a viking hat, barking at her and threatening to steal her pink and blue polka-dotted duvet cover using a chain-saw. 

I wish, because that would have confirmed the fact that I didn’t have to take a moment to relax and realize that I wasn’t a character in C.S.I. Nothing ever happened and the box was gone by the end of that month. 

I must admit that I didn’t learn my lesson and while writing this I’ve probably turned my head about 7 times to look over at the baby who just learned how to walk last month. But that’s another story. 

For now, I’ll just admit to the fact that I might be the obsessive crazy person who lives in the building on the other side of the street and keep on enjoying the daily spectacle happening across from me.