IT HAS HAPPENED!

I have infiltrated.

I am twenty minutes post-coffee with my next door neighbor...the next door neighbor whom I've been plotting to become friends with (to no avail) for months.

I'm in too deep, people. Too deep.

I was at my desk this morning writing away when I heard a knock on my door. Now a midday door knock (and this was mid-morning at 9:30am) is usually a little off-putting for me because I'm not usually in a state to receive people. Today was no exception as my teeth were still unbrushed after a late breakfast and I was braless in a fitted t-shirt that, well, requires a bra if I'd like to keep at least two secrets in this lifetime. (Seriously though, why be a writer who sits home alone all day if not to ditch your bra?) When I opened the door, she was standing there. Apparently her fire detectors went off twice in the night and she wanted to know if I heard them or have had any problems with my own fire detectors. (Or she was just looking for an excuse to talk to me. You'll remember from my last post that she's kind of into me. Who's the stalker now?)

First of all, I did not hear them go off (if they actually did go off) which concerns me as I know from experience that the smoke detectors in this place are of the screaming cartoon version variety. And since our apartment is small and we have like four of them in such a tiny space, if one goes off they all go off and we suddenly feel like we're in the midst of a prison riot. Her apartment (and detectors) are laid out similarly she said, yet I did not hear hers through our thin shared wall. Hmm.

We got to chatting about how sensitive these detectors are (I don't saute anything without the windows open and the fan on) and theorizing about what had happened since she obviously wasn't cooking anything in the middle of the night and more than one alarm went off, ruling out a short or electrical glitch. (Right?) Because I was raised by and among crazies, my first thought was, of course, ghosts. Despite the fact that I try to avoid conversations about the supernatural and probably because of this, in fact, such discussions follow me and are apparently now even cropping up with relative strangers because she also just assumed it was ghosts. Naturally. (Katie and Cherie---sisters who love all things poltergeist-y---you'll be happy to hear that she DVRs all the same ghost shows you do.) She thought it to be a peeving ghost versus a haunting one and because I grew up in a house where such a discussion would have been commonplace (and not the heaping pile of Casper bullshit that it probably seems here) I followed this line of logic. (But just so we're clear, this whole conversation will probably keep me up tonight.)

We chatted for a few minutes in my doorway and she was drinking a cup of coffee which I noted smelled delicious because, really, it smelled friggin' delicious. It was some coconut concoction. Well, as soon as I said it she offered me a cup and there I was following her into her kitchen---the lair!---to get a cup. I won't go into detail about her apartment except to say that A) there were no pictures of me and B) I've just finished redoing my own apartment to match her decor. (That way when we take down our adjoining wall, the feng shui will be maintained.) I stayed for about 20 minutes while we had our coffee and talked. Though my previous inclination would have been to recount (in fine, fine detail) all that I learned (between our actual talking and by way of my Law and Order trained eye into the psyche of a person by way of interior decoration), it's all feeling a little weird now. (Though I learned soooo much.)

How would you feel if someone was in your kitchen having a cup of coffee and then documenting it detail by detail on her blog without your knowledge? (How does it feel, husband and family?) It was one thing when she was a complete stranger and we were simply hi/byers. Now I've seen her kitchen sink and drunk out of her mug. (Why does that sound dirty?) (GC---drunk?) Also, while some day (probably when I'm her maid-of-honor and it's her wedding day) I may be able to explain away the previous posts by saying that I didn't really know her at all when I was writing this stuff, it's a different thing to continue on after I've been in her home. (Isn't it?) It's a little like in a romantic comedy when someone comes up with a lie in order to meet someone and then has to maintain the lie despite and because of the growing intimacy of the relationship. The lying gets worse the more they know each other. And while I'm not lying necessarily, my blogging about her as we become friends will get exponentially creepier. (And even I know that's really saying something...especially since we had one cup of coffee and I'm likening us to a couple in a John Cusack movie.)

It's a bit of a conundrum. I was really enjoying my little stalking segment on this blog but I found myself trying to avoid her in the days following these posts because I felt a little like a serial killer. Even now I want to be outside typing this up on my stoop but I'm afraid she'll return home while I'm out there and it's just too fucking weird to put down my computer for a second and take a break from writing about her to talk to her.

Why did we have to bridge the gap? Why must I be so damn likable?

As we were talking she told me about how she's thinking of going to art school and showed me some of her work which was really pretty incredible. She's an artist, guys. An artist. (I was waiting for her to go to the bathroom so that I could get naked and stretch across her couch to be painted but the opportunity never presented itself.) Such common ground though, led to my copping to be a writer.

"What do you write?" she asked.

"Um, non-fiction..."

Oy.

Really, at what point in a friendship can you admit that you've been pretending to be someone's stalker? Is that before or after the cell phone number exchange? Honesty is a questionable policy in this scenario. There is no way to explain things without seeming desperate or psycho and neither are particularly strong traits for attracting friendship.

The lines of art and life have been blurred. I've really screwed myself here and in some ways the best I can think to handle this is to break things off totally by acting all cold towards her so that she no longer wants a piece of this. I don't want to hurt the poor thing... (In the romantic comedy, we would be shaking our heads at John Cusack's bonehead logic, knowing as we do that they will get together in the end and he's just making things harder by not simply being honest. But I'm not John Cusack and I would probably never forgive a new friend such a foible. I'd think, "You're fucking weird. I can't be taking on any new crazies...and stop playing "In Your Eyes" outside my window.")

I'm really going to have to figure out how to proceed with this. I suppose the first thing to do is get in there and fix those smoke detectors...they weren't supposed to go off until Dan was away.