A Case for the Lily

Since moving into my apt (known as The Lily) in December 2010, my former roommate Betsy and I have construed stories regarding our middle-age, chain-smoking, should-be-on-an-episode-of-Horders, Korean neighbor who shares our two-flat on the bottom floor. An excessive amount of brand name packages arriving at our doorstep in her name combined with a locked and secluded portion of the basement dedicated to "beads" was the impetus to our curiosity. When friends would ask about her, we flippantly spewed off fragments of stories we conjured from late-night rounds of laundry in a basement stacked with antiques: she was married to a foreign ambassador, traveled the world, divorced, has a secret family, lived in Mexico, and possibly has emergency funds buried at the bottom of Lake Michigan. The tales we told were more or less true for us, and the line between fact and fiction seemed blurred in a way that invited us to live in a realm of possibilities.

Lily exterior.

What primarily began to tip us off about Pam wasn't just her denial of owning a cat when our house suddenly wreaked of dirty litter or her Estate Sale filled with thousand dollar furs or her newly acquired purple hair or her car revoked for "unknown reasons" or her changing the outside locks five or six times or only seeing her leave the house when she incessantly shouted for her dog in the yard... Rather, it is a case involving unmerited accusation causing us to question whether or not we should continue living in our dear Lily home.

Lily interior: my desk.

After a range of harassing texts regarding "disappearing crystal," conversations alluding to us as suspects of stealing, and threats to "evict us" scrawled on post-it notes tacked to our door, we awoke at 5:30AM yesterday to the crashing of doors below. When we tried to leave our home, chairs blocked our door and in a haywired voice, we were met with demands to give her back the piano she had given us last year. In seemingly convenient timing, our hot water heater broke and we were all left in a tired and baffled state as we fumbled through the motion of getting ready for the day.

[Yes yes- the police were called and all parties questioned, but hello - fear for our lives?!]

These days we feel like we are living in a real-life game of Clue with an accompaniment of mystery music following us as we come and go. What is real and what isn't? What do we choose to ignore and what do we take seriously? While there are certainly other factors at work here - our recent obsession with Serial or playing too many games of Mafia or perhaps a delusional spell that winter has cast on all of us - lately we can't shake the visions of headlines announcing a case that has suddenly unfolded in the heart of Lakeview.

View from inside:
the evergreen outside our window, which gives
the appearance of living in a treehouse even in the middle of winter.

It leaves all three of us in a form of puzzlement, albeit slightly entertained through the daily texts of gif chains and emoji'ed updates. All options are being considered as we proceed in a pre-cautionary buddy system to our cars and respond in startling jumps at each creak and doorknob... but seriously - what the what?!