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The world is a cruel, horrible, unforgiving place with a few good restaurants.

Apartment 5B

I have a neighbor who is a shut-in. I only see her once a week when she dons a hideous, bluish, pageboy wig and leaves her apartment to go somewhere–I don’t know where. Occasionally, I will see her when she quickly scurries out of her apartment to put her garbage in the trash chute. Sometimes when she opens the door to her apartment to take her trash out to the chute, and she hears me coming, she quickly slams her door closed and waits for me to disappear into the elevator so she doesn’t have to interact with me. Besides the times she takes out the trash or goes on that mysterious once-a-week appointment, she spends the rest of the time locked in her apartment with the tv blaring. I hear that loud tv anytime day or night that I walk by. I think she sleeps with it on. On those few occasions when I do find myself waiting by the elevator standing next to her, or when I pass her in the hallway, she will not make eye contact with me. When I try to say “Good Morning” or “Good Afternoon” to her, she does not respond, winces in pain, looks away, turning her face to the wall. The last time I was on the elevator with her she rode the whole way down with her face practically smooshed against the wall of the elevator. She would evaporate into the wall and become part of the paint to escape if she could.

Q: Should I stop trying to be friendly, and stop trying to engage her and leave her alone?

When I asked this question to friends, the resounding answer was, yes. That she has agoraphobia or extreme social anxiety, and that I should stop tormenting her by speaking to her, and that even a friendly “Hello” to such a person amounts to cruelty.

I had thought that being friendly and trying to draw her out, would relieve her loneliness and might provide her with an opportunity to break her isolation by exchanging, at least, single word greetings, with a neighbor who was a consistent and unthreatening figure in her universe….but now I see that, even doing that would be so outside her comfort zone that, my efforts, toward her, would simply amount to torture, and I don’t wish to torture the poor woman.

I won’t be speaking to her again.

When will you humans learn, that this silly momentary feeling you call “happiness” is nothing more than the universe giving you a brief coffee break before you get back to the hard work of life.