To My Upstairs Neighbor Learning How to Play the Piano
I moved into this apartment at the end of March, a few days after LA’s lockdown officially began. You started learning the piano in the beginning of April, a few days before we all realized we might be stuck inside for quite some time.
You often practiced in the morning while I made eggs and coffee. When the eggs were good, I posted them to Instagram. I mostly ignored you, or I turned up the fan to drown you out. I stayed glued to my phone, scrolling through a feed full of other people's breakfasts and bread-making, their work-from-home set-ups, the sunny spring views from their living room windows. We thought this would be over soon, that we'd better document it so we could show each other how we made the most of this time to better ourselves. I wondered if you were posting the piano playing to your own social media, or if you were waiting until you actually became good at it. I was sure you’d give up at some point, but I wondered if I’d need a larger fan until then to block out the sound of you.
The fan is for noise rather than ventilation: I have a neurological hypersensitivity to sound. If I have to listen to a noise I cannot control—chewing, loud music through a stranger's headphones, someone tapping a pen on a desk, applause that lasts too long—I often have an unusually adverse physical reaction. Sometimes it feels like an anxiety attack, sometimes my ears and face become so hot I have to leave the room, even if I’m at work. When I was living in New York (all sound, all the time), it got so bad that I would sometimes have hives after getting off the subway. Though the triggers have become slightly more predictable, a certain sound or situation can still take me by surprise and cause a reaction. Living alone helps. Loud neighbors do not.
While you learned the piano, I learned all the new sounds of my apartment. I learned that I have to wake up by 9 am on Monday mornings to turn the fan up to full volume and put on headphones with music, because the manager comes around to vacuum the hallways. I learned that one of the apartments in the building next to mine is undergoing renovations, and that sometimes the construction workers blast their favorite radio station for the whole street to hear. I learned that I have to keep my bathroom door closed, otherwise I can hear everything—literally, everything—that my neighbor does in his bathroom. Mornings are not a great time for him.
I took comfort in the fact that I wasn't the only one experiencing an education in the noise of my interior surroundings. I imagine many people faced the shock of new sounds in quarantine: family members or roommates they normally got a break from for at least a few hours most days. Getting used to another person's sounds is different from getting used to their presence. If you need physical space from them, you can scoot over; if you have another room in your apartment, you can leave the one you're in. It's much harder to escape the noise of someone. It can travel through walls and vents and open windows. Even if you're able to block it somehow, you can still sometimes feel its lingering vibrations.
One month turned into two. Two months turned into four. Most of us gave up posting our breakfasts and our quickly formed (and just as quickly discarded) hobbies; we stopped trying to give any sense that we were continuing on as normal. We told each other it was okay if we didn't learn a new hobby or bake a loaf of bread every week, that just surviving was admirable enough.
I waited for you to stop practicing. Shockingly, you didn’t, and even more shockingly, you got better. I listened as the sound of your playing gradually changed from single, deliberate chords into something that sounded like actual music. You still weren't great. There were pauses that didn’t sound intentional, some keys that sounded like maybe you hit them twice by mistake. But the hint of a melody started to form—something classical and melancholic, like a soundtrack meant to play in the background of some other action.
“I got angry at you. Where was all this motivation coming from? Why couldn’t you just accept survival like the rest of us?”
I tried to make some action for your music. You played while I sat on the floor caulking every baseboard. You played while I ran water for a bath. You played while I procrastinated on a writing deadline. You played while I tried to figure out how to take off my gel manicure at home. Any noise is easier for me to tolerate if I feel like I’m in control of it in some way. Even though I wasn’t in control of you and your noise, I could decide which action to set to music.
It sounded like you were trying to be respectful of anyone who could hear your playing. You never went hard on the piano, never tried to rock out. I could picture you sitting there, tentatively pushing each key as you stared hard at the chords laid out on sheets of paper with your handwritten notes in the margins. Maybe you watched tutorials as you got dressed in the morning—if you still got dressed every morning. I stopped around week three.
I got angry at you. Where was all this motivation coming from? Why couldn't you just accept survival like the rest of us? I scrolled through Instagram posts from people clearly feeling as hopeless as I was, as trapped and uninspired and motionless. No one was showing off anymore. No one else was mastering the piano. What gave you the right to live a life separate from our newsfeeds?
I wondered what you did for a living before quarantine, and if you could still do that job from home, if you'd been laid off like I had, or if you were in school like I was. I wondered if you lived alone by choice or not; if you were lonely, if you ever talked to anyone on the phone. For all the piano playing I heard coming from your apartment, I never once heard your voice.
I'm used to most of the sounds in my apartment and the neighborhood by this point. They haven’t changed from negative to positive in my mind; I’ve just registered enough of a pattern that I know how to drown them out and calm myself down. This is the best-case scenario for my condition. There is no way to stop exterior sound from infiltrating my life. The best I can do is figure out how to counter the noise I cannot control with noise that I can. It’s a form of adaptation: accepting what I cannot control, focusing on what I can.
But I don’t have to explain that to you. You clearly know that. You've learned a full song by now, and sometimes you play it in its entirety, about three minutes, in the evenings when I'm making dinner. I don’t know what it is except that it’s soft and slow, still classical, still melancholic, still with an occasional pause, though they have become less frequent. It doesn’t sound like it belongs in the background anymore. I imagine you playing with your eyes closed, the satisfaction of learning something new warming your face as your fingers dart in and out of the light, moving across the keys, as the rest of us continue to frantically refresh our newsfeeds and bake our breads, trying to combat the endless noise of global chaos.
I still keep the fan close, but now, when I hear you playing, I turn it down to listen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackie DesForges is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing through the Low Residency program at UC Riverside, and her work has been published or shown in The New York Times, Exposition Review, Matador Network, Woman Made Gallery, and more. She is currently working on her first novel and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @jackie__writes.
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Header photo by Ebuen Clemente Jr.