So Near Yet So Distant

There was a summer in my childhood when all my brother and I did was rent laserdiscs and had movie-marathons, and of the titles we recall liking, most of them were sci-fi ones by James Cameron or Steven Spielberg. Years later I would get the DVD of most of those films, but the one that I still couldn’t find is about extraterrestrials descending to a run-down apartment in New York, and repairing it. The name of that movie is *batteries not included, and I’m going out of my limb here, but I’m guessing the DVD copy won’t have batteries too. I’ve only seen that movie once, yet I liked it very much for two things. The first is that the extraterrestrials—sentient flying saucers smaller than a matchbox—were way adorable. The second is that the tenants of the apartment they saved were close-knit. That may sound mundane to anyone, but that meant a lot to me because it makes me wistful of the ties that I feel is absent in the building I’ve been living in for more than 15 years.

I live in a 16-storied condominium in the middle of a city. And in a place where tall buildings are common, this one is a boring, unremarkable slab of gray, without anything to make it stand out. It also likes to resist changes: the only significant one I’ve seen in all my years living here is that we now have cameras inside our two elevators. The parking lot still looks the same, the security guards working nighttime still sleep on their job, and our elevators are still slower than a crippled spider. It still has the same tenants, and the idiots are still idiots about the elevator even after 10 years of usage: they press up when they mean to go down, and they don’t hold the door open for incoming passengers.

And while it may sound like I’m not very fond of people living here—which is true, for some—that does not mean I want to distance myself from them. It also wouldn’t be so bad if my case is an isolated one, but no, everyone is insular and there’s no sense of kinship. All my 15-years here, I see the same tenants greeting each other with the same old dull topics. They’d say the how-are-you’s or the how’s-business’s for the sake of being polite, without any interest of hearing the answers. I’ve never seen, or heard, of anyone here asking another to hang out somewhere and to see movies together so that they can have animated spoiler-intensive conversations while taking the elevators home.

Last November, after reading about how my neighbor infuriates me, my friend Ryan chatted with me to console me from all my frustrations. And while I appreciate his small act of kindness, I soon resented the stress that the topic was giving me. So to lighten up the conversation, I told Ryan about a cute girl who also lives in the same building where I live, and that I wouldn’t mind getting to know her.

And then just a few days ago, I did get to talk to her. She was on the seat next to me when I was commuting my way home, so I introduced myself to her as a person who lives in the same building as she does. And then I found out that she also works in the same building where I work, which is an hour away from home. We also went to the same university and studied in the same high school. One would think that in such situations, there would be loud utterances of I-can’t-believe-it!’s; instead, none of us were particularly floored by what we’re learning from another.

I don’t know what is weirder, that we work, live, and study in the same place, or that we’re not fascinated by those facts. All I know is that if such amazing coincidences fail to amaze us, then chances are, we won’t become very close friends, like how we are distant to everyone else from where we live.