The Pen Pal Who Turned Out to Be My Neighbor
We wrote across oceans for years, separated by one staircase.
For three years I poured my heart out to a woman in Galway who turned out to live directly above my ceiling.
I had complained to her, in writing, about her own pressure cooker.
Let me back up.
Three years ago I was newly single in a city of twenty million people, which is a special kind of alone. It is the loneliness of crowded lifts, of eating dinner standing at the counter because sitting at a table for one felt like a formal announcement. I was writing a little then, badly, mostly at night, working through a page of poetry prompts the way other people work through crosswords. One prompt said: write a letter to a stranger you will never meet.
I liked it so much I went looking for an actual stranger.
The Slow Post Society, the website was called. A pen pal exchange for people who missed envelopes. The gimmick was anonymity: you wrote to a code name, mailed your letter to the Society's clearing office in London, and they forwarded it onward, postmarks laundered, addresses hidden. You knew your match only by their words. Mine was SPS-1147, who signed her first letter "Wren."
Wren's first letter was four pages about a bakery fire she could smell from her window, burnt sugar and panic, and how the whole street stood outside in their nightclothes rating the firemen. I laughed alone in my flat like a lunatic. I wrote back six pages. It escalated from there.
She never said where she lived and neither did I. That was half the romance of it. But the envelopes came through London, and she once mentioned rain "the way it only rains here, sideways, personally," and she used words like "grand" and quoted an Irish poet, so I built her a life in Galway. Stone walls. Wind. A cardigan situation. I populated an entire coastline for this woman.
For three years we wrote every two or three weeks. She knew about my breakup, my mother's surgery, the poem I was too scared to show anyone. I knew about her dead husband, her daughter in Toronto who called only on Sundays, her war with her building's water pump. We were completely honest with each other in the way you can only be with someone you are certain you will never have to look at.
Which brings me to the pressure cooker.
My upstairs neighbor, an older woman I knew only as a ceiling, ran a pressure cooker every evening at seven that whistled like a train announcing a personal grievance. I wrote to Wren about it. At length. I called the unseen woman upstairs "the Admiral," because she clearly ran her kitchen like a naval campaign. Wren found the Admiral hilarious. She asked for updates. For two years, the Admiral was a recurring character in our letters.
Meanwhile, Wren had her own villain: the person below her who typed late at night, "a woodpecker with a deadline," and played the same sad song on repeat until the floor was marinated in it.
I want to be very clear that I felt sorry for her, having to live above such a person.
The unravelling took one afternoon. There was a notice in our lobby, handwritten, taped above the letterboxes: "Please stop leaving milk packets on the ledge. The cats have formed a union."
I stood there smiling at it, and then I stopped smiling, because I knew that handwriting.
I knew the loop on the g. I knew the impatient little crossbar flung at the t like a dart. I had three years of that handwriting in a shoebox under my bed.
I told myself it was a coincidence...
Then I did the arithmetic I had been carefully not doing. The bakery fire, three streets over, I had smelled it too. The water pump war, our building, the third floor. The daughter who called on Sundays, and the phone voice I could faintly hear through my ceiling every Sunday at four.
The Admiral was Wren.
I had spent two years complaining to Wren about Wren.
Worse. Much worse.
The woodpecker with a deadline was me.
I sat on the stairs between our floors for a long time, holding the notice I had peeled off the wall like evidence. Anonymity had felt so safe, and here was the punchline: I had been more honest with the woman upstairs than with anyone I had ever shared a wall, a meal, or a bed with. She had held my worst year in her hands and gone on soaking her rajma anyway, nightly, at seven, like a metronome keeping me company.
I could have said nothing. We could have gone on forever, oceans apart, one staircase away. I thought about it... truly. Some machines only run because nobody opens them.
Instead I wrote a letter. One line. "Dear Wren, the Admiral's pressure cooker was especially musical tonight. Yours, the woodpecker downstairs." I did not send it through London. I slid it under her door and then panicked and was halfway down the stairs when her door opened.
She stood there with the letter in one hand and her glasses in the other, and she looked at me the way you look at a word you have read a thousand times that has suddenly stopped making sense. Then she said, "You... YOU are 2091?" That was my code name. SPS-2091.
"You told me she was in Galway," I said, idiotically, to the woman herself, about herself.
"I never said Galway. You decided Galway. I let you have it because it sounded nicer than upstairs."
She made tea. Of course she made tea, in the very kitchen, next to the very pressure cooker, which sat there gleaming like a celebrity I had only ever heard on the radio. We compared letters like war veterans comparing maps and found the places where our two versions of the same street corner did not match, and the places where they matched so exactly it made the back of my neck cold. The sideways rain. The jasmine man at the signal. We had been describing the same world to each other and calling it foreign.
I searched the whole world for a stranger who understood me, and the whole time she was the footsteps over my head.
Here is what nobody tells you about loneliness in a big city: it is not a lack of people. It is a lack of permission. Everyone I needed was already stacked around me in concrete, and it took a clearing office in London and three years of postage to introduce me to a woman I could have reached by shouting into a saucepan.
We still write. That is the part people refuse to believe. She is seventy meters of pipe and plaster away, and every week or so an envelope appears under my door, or I leave one under hers, and we do not discuss the letters when we meet on the stairs. On the stairs we talk about the weather and the cats' union, like proper neighbors. The real conversation stays on paper, where it was born.
Last month her letter ended with a request. She wants me to finally show someone the poem she has been guarding for three years, the one I was too scared to share. She says if I post it on the community wall where poets put up their work, she will print it out and tape it in the lobby, above the letterboxes, next to the cats.
I have not done it yet... But her pressure cooker went off at seven tonight, one long whistle, and I have started to suspect it means hurry up.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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