my neighbours cant hang laundry to save their lives
I stand in my kitchen, with the hum of the kettle boiling, and inevitably I glance at the windows of the apartment across.
Bright in the morning sun, their laundry flaps in the wind, heavy with moisture, hung at weird angles along the three lines on pullies outside their window.
They're too far to make any sound, but in my mind I hear the weeping of fabric, sobbing, begging to be pulled in to the safety of an indoor drying rack.
The concept of Hung here is tenuous both in definition and physical fact. Because I do not think my neighbours (and I emphasise here the plural, for these are multiple groups of people across three different floors) are able to hang their laundry.
I do not mean that there is a "correct" way to hang your laundry, but I believe that the first consideration for a well-hung piece of clothing you want to dry, is that it remains hung.
It could very well be that I am neurotic, however, peeking down towards the ground floor of their building, there is always a once-fresh-now-disgusting piece of laundry of which provenance could be of any of these three floors. There are even instances where clothing will fall onto the lines of one of the other floors, and hang there for days... ignored, dangling.
Now I hear you, and I understand: what if these people have some sort of invisible disability that prevents them from performing mundane tasks such as these? I know, and that is a reasonable thought. Guilt would eat at me like a swarm of locusts on a wheat field. But here is the twist... this is atleast three different groups of people, maybe ten in total, who I believe have no personal relationship or friendship with the other floors. If your neighbour had their undies hanging on your lines, I'm sure you'd take them off and let them know about it.
With this in mind, I feel that it is impossible that all of these distinct individuals would be afflicted with some sort of mental or physical difficulty, whether visible or otherwise. This minute statistical observation, I hope, should grant me a crumb of mercy in the afterlife.
With my own peepers, I have witnessed a grown man attempting to hang a wet duvet with only two pegs. It sagged, heavy with moisture and dripped onto the laundry of those beneath him. And with my own peepers, I have seen the same duvet splattered on the ground floor. It lived there for a week.
How is this not an anomaly? How is it possible that these people all share the same incompetence? What are the chances?
I am not even annoyed...
It's a free world I recite to myself, let them hang their clothes however they want to hang them...
...I am baffled and intrigued.
Is this some sort of elaborate exercise of free-will? Is it a game that I have not been cc'd in? What is it? Why is it happening?!