On Mice and Ghosts and Living Alone

I live in a carriage house.  My apartment is a studio above two bays of a three-car garage that was probably built in the 50s.  The ceiling has cool angles, and the windows are small and oddly-shaped.  They’re old – some of the ropes attached to the weights in the wall have snapped, and they don’t open and close smoothly.  My air conditioning unit is very small and has a hard time keeping up with the hot air in the winter.  It’s a lot like living in an attic.  If I’m away for too long and the air gets stale, it has that grandma-attic-y smell.  I love it.

My place is set behind a pretty big old house in a really nice residential neighborhood.  It’s quiet and dark at night, and that’s like heaven to me.  I can play Metallica loud when I’m cleaning and whatnot, and I’m pleasantly alone whenever I’m home.  There’s an old lady in the house that has help and I see them every once in a while.  The kids are all grown with kids of their own and the lines between yard and gardens are wonderfully blurred.  In the spring the purple of the crocuses dust everything.  It’s very cozy all the time.  The german word is gemütlich, and everything about where I live is that.

I share my abode with mice and ghosts and we have a pact.  I don’t bother them, and they don’t bother me.  In exchange, they can have whatever they need from me:  the mice get warmth and crumbs and the ghosts get whatever it is that ghosts dig about living with me.  Both are required to stay out of sight, which is easier for the latter than the former.  But I’ve only seen a mouse once.  I wish the mice would figure out that I can see signs of their passing, but I think they’re maybe just reminding me that they live here too and that they’re keeping up their end of the bargain by staying out of sight.  By “signs of passing”, I generally mean teenily shredded scraps of various colored paper.  Surprisingly, I’m pretty sure they prefer to shit outside.

I bought mousetraps when I first moved in, with which my cohabitants had quite a bit of fun at my expense.  They’d eat whatever I put out for them, to my endless frustration.  I keep the mousetraps around as a kind of warning, but I think they’re more for my own tough-feelingness than anything else.  I don’t like mousetraps anyway – as dextrous as my fingers are, I think I’m more likely to catch one of them than a mouse.  Neither would I want to catch a mouse – I’d feel too bad about having killed it.  Please don’t tell the guys in my fight club.

As far as the ghosts go, well, they like to make funny noises at night and stand by my bed to remind me that they live here too.  We had a couple of heated wordless discussions when I first moved in, and every once in a while I have to reassert my authority as the rent-payer, but overall we get along just fine.  I have no idea what they get from me.  Maybe companionship, maybe some sort of vicarious experience or energy.  Either way, I wish them well.  I suppose I could banish them if I ever got pissed, but I can imagine what frustration they may have at being incorporeal.  Besides, I don’t really get that pissed about stuff like that anymore.

I live alone, but not really.  There’s nobody with whom to talk, but that’s why I live alone.  My mice and ghosts simply add to the coziness of my home.  It would be empty without them.

Tagged as: attic-y, carriage house, cozy, gemutlich, ghosts, living alone, mice