出した署名

From the end of June, a low sound started coming from the floor above at two in the morning. I knew at once it was a washing machine. For the first three days I put up with it. By the time a week had passed, I was waking up before the noise even started.

At work during the day I got a figure wrong twice. To my colleagues, and to my mother back home, I did nothing but complain about the floor above. Although it was someone whose face I did not even know, in my head I blamed that person over and over.

When I phoned the management company, they explained that they could not easily act on one person's account, but that with signatures from other residents they could issue a warning. Exactly as the staff member had said, I wrote a letter of complaint and gathered eleven signatures. If the nights of not sleeping because of the noise went on, I wrote in the letter, there was a risk of ruining my health. That was not a lie.

On the morning I went to hand it in, I met the person from upstairs for the first time, in front of the lift. She was a woman of about thirty carrying white work clothes, and she said she was working night shifts at a hospital. If she did her laundry after getting home, she said, it could only ever fall at that hour. She said she had known she was being a nuisance, and she apologised. In my bag was the envelope with the signatures in it. I hesitated for thirty minutes, and decided to hand the envelope in anyway.

A week later the night-time sound was gone. According to my neighbour, after her night shifts she now goes three times a week to a coin laundry two stations away. I sleep well now, but there is no way it feels good. In exchange for quiet nights, I made one night longer for someone living in the same building. I did not throw away the copy of the complaint letter; it is in my desk drawer.