At the time I was evicted, I was living in a very nice one-bedroom apartment in a thriving coastal city I will rename Bad Move because this is not a work of fiction and god knows someone from Bad Move will read this post and sue me for something although when I left Bad Move no one was sad to see me leave, no one saw me leave, and what's very likely is that no one noticed I wasn't there anymore so the likelihood of anyone from Bad Move reading this post and recognizing its poster is not high and I shouldn't worry, but I do.
I moved into that nice apartment with high hopes for starting the-new life-after-divorce I'd been working at for the past six years. What I didn't know was that I'd been living the new life ever since I moved out of the marital home and into the first of the three miserable rental situations that were to come. When I moved into the first one, friends assured me that my unhappiness was a temporary thing. "You are starting over and soon your life will be better than ever!" and "This is just a time of transition from a bad place to a place of strength!"
One of the things that was making me so unhappy was living with the smell of cigarette smoke. That first apartment I moved into apres-divorce was one in a triplex with a neighbor to my right who smoked on her back steps so the smell wouldn't drift into her apartment, and a neighbor upstairs who didn't want her husband to know she smoked so she did it in a narrow space between our building and the one next to it. In each case the smoke went right into my apartment, whether or not my windows were open, and stayed there because there was no cross-ventilation in that place. Late at night, someone in the neighborhood smoked outdoors and the smoke went right into my apartment. During the day when neither of my neighbors was home, I'd smell cigarette smoke in my dining and living room but no one was smoking, not even outside! It was only those two rooms and it moved from floor-level to waist-high as I crawled around on my hands and knees, tracking it. It drove me nuts.
I eventually moved from that apartment to the first of two in Bad Move. The day I moved in, I smelled for the first time the stench that would rise from the living room floor each afternoon. It was caused by a pond that had been formed in the crawl space directly under my unit, fed by water, grease and tiny bits of garbage leaking from a kitchen pipe of the unit next to mine, and it was not going to be fixed.
That building was a fourplex with three renters who were heavy smokers and one who was not. The fourplex next door housed heavy smokers. I lived in a ground-floor unit with living room windows that opened to the street where ocean breezes carried in hash and cigarette smoke from smokers who conducted business directly in front of those windows. My neighbor with the leak in his kitchen pipe smoked in his bathroom which adjoined mine and which had a peephole drilled through our adjoining medicine cabinets. Shortly after I moved in, that neighbor began working at home in a small room that adjoined my small workroom and he smoked and smoked while he worked and I may as well have been smoking in mine if I tried to work at the same time he did. Under other windows in my living room was the garbage area for my building and the one next door. My neighbors were busy, preoccupied people who were unconcerned with garbage removal and you can forget recycling, so it was left to me to make sure the bins were put on the street for pick-up by the peculiar garbage service of Bad Move or else I would smell the lives of about 15 people if I opened those windows.
There's one more apartment to go before I finish this topic. Just you wait.
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