Love Thy Neighbor

by Eric Kalata

There was a new guy that moved across the street from me, a new neighbor, and every time he saw me on the front porch puffing away, he asked to bum a smoke. It got so incessant that I had begun smoking in the backyard instead, not wishing to part with any of my precious pack of cigarettes if it wasn’t to be consumed by me.

After a couple of weeks of sequestering myself behind the house, I saw him again as I left for work out the front door. He said hello, but his tone seemed down, as though he knew he frustrated me with his requests. A dog with its tail between its legs.

I felt a pang of guilt.

I thought of the time I worked in a Lebanese restaurant, fast casual, a glorified line cook dropping fries and balls of falafel in hot oil and shredding shawarma off the spit, stuck in the kitchen for hours with the head chef, a man who could speak six languages but never deigned to learn English. Naturally, our conversations were sparse, mostly carried out through gestures and intonation and the smattering of French and Spanish that I knew. When I would leave too many stems in the chopped parsley for the tabbouleh that we made fresh every day, he would pick up a stem and shake it in front of my face, swearing in Arabic, curses I couldn’t understand as his face would grow red, going on in languages alien to me until he got it out of his system and calmed back down. He would go back to making gallons of toum, a garlic sauce we served with most of the sandwiches and entrées, returning to silence with hardly a shade of tension.

He would smile at my struggles with difficult customers when I had to work the register or laugh with me at the ridiculous demands of our bosses, give a gesture that they were crazy, and I would allow myself to grin or chuckle back. Nothing ever lingered with him. We were neighbors then, in the greasy kitchen, or coworkers or comrades, whatever works best. We were connected by the need to feed into something bigger than ourselves, if only to keep our jobs, even if it was some rough and tumble local restaurant that couldn’t pay us enough. It was far from picturesque, but it was something beautiful in the misery of our lives as we worked together.

As punk and grunge were built around celebrating the glory in what was considered ugly and damned, maybe so should our community. Maybe nuisance comes with the territory of being known. Maybe when one says they love people, “warts and all,” they mean because of the warts, not in spite of them.

I left the establishment after a new owner came in and fucked up the menu. It shuttered shortly thereafter. I wondered what my Syrian chef had moved on to in its stead, if he continued making gallons of hummus or found a new job that allowed him some rest.

At my current job, I was recently talking to a woman that I had known for years, a bit younger than me, and for some reason that day she looked terribly gorgeous, nearly arresting me mid-conversation with her verdant eyes and constant smile. Is it the neighborly thing to hold back such a compliment, lest it’s unwanted, or should I have told her that she looked great in the sunshine, that it caught her angles perfectly, even if I had never noticed her glamour until that day, in that moment. Maybe it was just a spectacular and perfect day, warm and bright as the trees grew in their leaves all around us, slowly but surely bringing back life from the winter. Maybe it was all her essence, built up over the years of knowing her into some reserve in my soul that threatened to spill over unexpectedly. Maybe she was just pretty.

Regardless, as she sat opposite me at the picnic table, I had to hold back the desire to try to kiss her, to ask her to kiss me, and to have said fuck it for the rest of the day and follow her wherever she may go, to whatever adventure was next in her life.

But I held back. She left with a wave and one last smile and a promise that we would see each other again soon, and of course we would. The city had seemed to shrink over the years. Hardly can I go anywhere without someone knowing me. Sometimes I believed I had met everyone there was to meet in Richmond, but inevitably a new neighbor would appear, replacing the neighbors that had moved on to somewhere bigger and better. But were we not still neighbors, even far across this continent, far across the world?

Later that same shift, I watched as the soloist played his guitar and sang, masterful melodies flowing through his fingers and larynx. A talented and beautiful man, someone else I had worked with plenty before, an absolute joy to be around, and yet when he had showed up, he had been excited to see me.

That this man viewed me as a peer, spoke to me as an equal even though he had at least a decade of skill and knowledge over me, sent me into a dizzy spiral. I had inadvisably smoked weed from a gravity bong before sitting back and watching him as my phone charged, with nothing to distract me from his magnificent performance, mesmerized, but a nauseating anxiety took hold as I began to think about all my peers, all my neighbors in this world, the people beyond just him and her.

How hard they all worked, how brilliant they all were, how they sparkled like roman candles against a starry night sky as fireworks bloomed above them. In that moment, I wanted to kiss everyone, the performer on stage, the patrons at their tables, all the servers and cooks and bartenders, everyone from the dishwasher to the owner, and hold them close, assure them that I would always love them, to finally use my words with my mouth and not the ones formed by my fingers.

I used to believe everyone held their own private genius, something wondrous inside them that you just had to chisel out, everyone an unopened geode, waiting to be cracked open and their inner gems revealed, but I had hardened over the years, looking down on people that were always my equal, looking down on myself, mistaking confidence for a lack of humility and not something nurtured in spite of it. I was getting the creeping feeling that that original theory was right all along, and all we needed to pull it out of each other is a little bit of love.

The J.D. Salinger story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” from Nine Stories ends with one character sobbing to another, awoken from a drunken stupor, the former begging for affirmation, asking, “I was a nice girl… wasn’t I?” For years now, I fear I have done the same, on top of looking down my nose at so many people, hiding from some and begging for acknowledgment from others, acknowledgment that had been freely given all along had I simply paid attention to what others would say to me.

There is much love in the world if only you can open your heart and accept it. We are all neighbors, we are all people, with capacity for great love and great evil, and must build upon our social foundations with an abundance of support. We must accept that support, and we must give that support.

I told myself that the next time my new neighbor asked for a cigarette, I would buy him a whole fresh pack. It is the neighborly thing to do.

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