Two months ago I began the odyssey of packing up my old place where I had stayed for a near record breaking eighteen months. I was extremely excited about moving because I was finally able to afford a beautiful, sunny, one bedroom apartment above ground, and also that I was getting away from the drunk Macedonian dog beater next door to me. Things had not been going well between Mr. Hyde and myself ever since that fateful day when I called the Humane Society on him. Harsh words were spoken between the two of us and I had to endure the soulful stares of his dog every time I passed by the now gated back yard, but even the fact that we had had such an altercation didn’t stop him from peaking through my windows at every opportunity. I was so excited to be rid of him that I didn’t even care that he had made a habit of ringing my doorbell late at night in his underwear on the premise of giving me homegrown cucumbers because I was finally going to be rid of him. Unfortunately, exorcising this demon would not be as easy as I thought. Two days before my big move my friend and co-worker came to pick up my old couch that I had promised her, and we proceeded to try and move it up the stairs and out the door without any other assistance. Mr. Hyde unfortunately had other plans. When he saw that we were moving my couch between his beat up old Volvo and my landlord’s SUV, he decided to take action. Unfortunately the action that he took was to yell that he would sue me for every penny I had if I damaged his car, and to which my co-worker replied that she had a nickel in her pocket and would gladly take it off his hands, but that she would need change. Things went from bad to worse the next day when my mother and her friend arrived to move the rest of my furniture to my beautiful new abode, and he stood in the middle of the driveway and told them that they would have to park the moving van down the street because it was blocking his driveway. It was at this point that my landlord’s fiancé got involved and they ended up arguing in the driveway about how much space actually belonged to him and what was legally theirs while we moved my entire life in front of and around them. When the last box had been loaded and the last cat had been fastened in its cage I decided to make the grand gesture of bidding farewell to Mr. Hyde because, in spite of all that had happened in the last eighteen months, I didn’t want to leave my old life knowing that I hadn’t at least tried to patch things up. What I should have done was listen to my gut. As I went to shake his hand he pulled me closer and tried to pat me on the bottom. So here I was thinking that I would increase my good Karma by turning the other cheek and the fucker tries to cop a feel. It was at this point that I made it very clear that I would be checking in from time to time to see if the dog was being taken care of, and that I had informed the other neighbors of what had happened as well. I ended the conversation by wishing him well, to which he replied ‘Fuck off.’

Lesson learned. A hard lesson too since his bad energy seemed to rub off on the rest of the move. One car accident, two dehydrated cats, one severely strained back and a fit of hysterics from my mother later I am now ensconced in my beautiful apartment. I fall in love every single time I open my door and see two contented kitty cats sprawled on the balcony; I fall in love every time I wake up and look at the brightness of my home. I won’t say that I’ll never leave because never is a very long time, but I will say that after the last eighteen months of dealing with the misery of my neighbor I feel like I have stepped into a little slice of heaven. This time I think the Moving Demon has been well and truly exorcised.