Boarded House

Since moving into this house almost 3 months ago...only myself and one other occupant remain, everyone else has moved out and with each departure maintenance staff comes in to bang, rip up, hammer away, paint and curse like truck drivers for days. The adjacent apartment to me was empty, leaving the porch entirely for our use, until last week when the young woman and her mother re-appeared with a U Haul and hauled all her stuff over 3 days...then the 5 students living upstairs spent 4 days dumping couches, chairs and assorted garbage into the dumpster and all along the side of the house since the dumpster is overflowing for the past week. There is only one dumpster, maintenance staff uses it, tenants use it and visitors looking for anything to take home to re-use, use it. The noise and activity is noticeable because the dumpster sits below my bedroom window. I called a laundromat last week listed in Laundromats in PA and a gentleman answered, seemed civil, charged $1 a pound no difference in clothes to blankets. He arrived later the next afternoon with 2 other people, one woman in their back seat waving and another man who helped him with the 3 heavy bags into the car. I thought well, okay, maybe a family business or folks trying to start a business. The laundry was returned, color leakage, almost dry and the fee was $70. For 2 days I tried calling the guy to pay for the laundry. Someone returned my call only to tell me that only one gentleman accepts the money/charge card info, please call D--- at this number --- --- ---. When I finally reached him, gave him the card info, expiration, bk code, name I thought we were finished. The charge never appeared on my card. Tonight a man calls, blithering all over..."uh, I wanna speak to Ms. R please is this her? " Now I can smell something is rotten in Denmark or maybe Homestead. He wants my address because "they" wont process the charge without an address. I dont know who he was but he surely wasnt the man I spoke with last week because that dude was lucid and spoke English not Ibo. I refused to give him my address, told him all payment info was provided last week and btw, why wasn't the charge still now made on the card? I told him go call D, he has everything, and hung up and blocked his number. As of this evening, there still isnt a charge. If D comes here and can explain WTF, I'll pay him but I will not be using anyone again to wash for me. This is not NY. This is a wilderness I dumped myself into thinking I will be living in a smaller city, so surely that would mean a level of business saavy and responsibility. This apartment does not feel like 'home'-it feels like a 2 room hotel, very unsettled and I knonw this is why I keep moving furniture around, looking to find the right positions-dammit, its like nesting or maybe fung shei, looking for the right way for things to be, but they aren't right. What a strange world where no one says, would you like to take a morning or afternoon and I'll show you downtown or the shopping area...like where do people buy curtain rods or sheets? Household items? Would you like me to show you how to use the bus lines for your doctor appointments? A mom doesnt need things like that, MOMs just know and these things just come like magic no matter where a Mom finds herself. I hope before I die to find one person I can trust, just one. It has not been easy living terrified inside a cement sealed concrete box with slits to view the world and another to speak, but no one sees the box until I try too hard to be friendly or talk too much, the disease symptoms of the Lonely Crowd. I have long given up ever knowing what it is to be loved and cared for by another adult, but having a friendship to be able to speak and be spoken to as women speak to me anon online, like old friends, with concerns, like sisters...all invisible, some disappear and we never know if they died or are too depressed to write. There is something in me that never wants to Write or use any skill that I had to use to escape my parents and marriage. I dont know how ghost writers live with themselves, I did that for years, and profiling people who were nobodies that insisted they were somebodies enough to warrant seeing themselves in print about their unsold art how they did it. Such vanity... felt so many years at my job like the kid who watches the emperor parade his new elaborately embroidered robe down the streets lined with loyal subjects...in fact he strutted with his scepter, stark naked. And a child yells, the emperor has no clothes on! Whether in CH or Williamsburg, Boro Park, Monsey, there are emperors(mostly self appointed) big and small who lost their clothes along the way. I've spent my entire life in rescue mode, rescuing parents, husbands, colleagues and all the while torn inside waiting for that someone out there to find me, to rescue me. That G-d even listens and hears at this point in my journey, I guess is the most I can ask for now. I had a skill that elevated me, took me away from the alcoholic tantrums and fights, way way above my parents then my father understood and pushed me towards law...but it was all too late. Writing and speaking was my tool to dig myself out of Hell, the only person I trusted, died. The stories on teleiviosn about Hoarders fascinates me because i do the opposite. Accumulate almost nothing. I keep only those documents pertaning to my first husbands divorce becuase of child support payments, I dont anyone coming one day, as they already did once, to say I still owe child support. Or find my taxes garnished while I am paying child support. No live in 2 rooms still where everything has a place, can be touched and seen for stem to stern, there is no where to hide. I discard things without thought, wrong clothes, shoes, food, whatever, gone. Absolutely no connection to anything, living or dead. Even the cats, my fear of having to abandon them is to have them put to sleep before they experience the pain of abandonement, because cats do and they cry. That kitten cried for 2 days, helplessly and no one could help it. Where is the line between playing G-d and following the rule that you must not let another life suffer? what is the definition of suffering? there is no univeral definition. As Ramadan began last night, dying and starving Somalis who may be trying to fast in observance, are intentionally being targeted for massacres by "islamic militants". Islamic militant is the same type of oxymoron as Orthodox Jew who butchered a young boy. Orthodox JEWS who are orthodox, do not butcher children. Muslims who observe prayers, modesty, required good health laws, [protect their families and daughters, do not go out to murder other muslims. They may claim they act in the name of a prophet or idea but G-d doesnt sanction slaughter and murder, these acts come to us when the human mind is distorted with lies and fears, its warps the mind in meat factories, colleges, in religious communities where television and now the pervasive internet has taken over everyone, every one so that any semblence of modesty, any curtain of decency is gone...we are all naked, but the more pompous among us continue to have us believe they are clothed, therefore trustworthy.