NOTICE

on coming home.

The couch has barely cleared the threshold when the first email appears.

RUGS, says the subject line. All caps. I don’t yet recognize the name of whoever is shouting.

PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES INSIDE THE APARTMENT. DO YOU HAVE RUGS DOWN YET? YOUR FOOTSTEPS ARE SO LOUD MY CEILING IS SHAKING.

Ah, I think. Our new downstairs neighbor seems like fun.

He has our email because as luck would have it, he is also the building manager. I regret that there is no “rewind” button for life, no mythic ability to go back and undo our choices, armed with the knowledge of the future. Instead, I begin to digest that I have just signed a lease on top of a troll.

I fire off a polite reply. What he hears is the sound of our movers, moving. They must keep their boots on because there is snow on the ground. We’ll be settled in soon, as will our rugs.

By this point, I’ve lived in at least a dozen NYC apartments, each with their fair share of special neighbors — the guy who dressed like a superhero and left under the cover of darkness, or the one who stacked pizza boxes in precarious piles outside their door, or the family who blasted “Baby Shark” twenty-four hours a day for a full year until doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo underscored my dreams. But never has anyone cited me as the source of unwanted sound. Moving is noisy, I think, but we are not. Surely, this will be fine.

Yet the emails continue:

TELEVISION

MUSIC

STOMPING

NOISE

Or my favorite, the perennial catch-all, NOTICE, which he employs with staggering frequency.

We layer rugs on top of carpets on top of (allegedly) sound-proof padding, sport slippers that make us look like cloud-hoofed sheep. We stop inviting guests, avoid using the blender, watch TV on a laptop, steer clear of the floorboards that creak. Short of levitation, there is nothing more we can do. Except, of course, to leave.

We have to move, we say, so often we almost stop hearing it. It becomes a pleasantry, a tic, sound that no longer has meaning. We have to move, we say, as rents skyrocket and we linger just a tad longer in rent-stabilized limbo.

We stay four years. It never feels like home.

*

When I was a kid, my prized possession was an electric typewriter that clickety-clacked like a herd of Clydesdales. (The downstairs neighbor would’ve loved it.) I used it to write stories ­— complicated, formulaic sagas about teen serial killers and angsty vampires, not-so-loosely inspired by R.L. Stine. I tried my best to practice typing as we’d learned in school, fingers positioned on the home keys.

I liked this idea of home. A check-in point. A landing. The constant that punctuated the story as it unfolded.