Page 1 of Up All Night
Chapter 1
I hadn’t slept in three fucking days.
My neighbor. It was my stupid neighbor whose name I could not tell you now. All I knew was that he was French (because everyone in my share house was French,) and had recently quit his job to, I don’t know, lift weights at the gym all day and make food in the kitchen that I always had to clean up.
Basically, this guy was annoying enough when hewasn’tkeeping me awake 24/7.
You tell someone, “My French neighbor kept me up for three days straight,” and the first thing they do is nudge you with a wink and reply, “That good, huh?” Honey, I wish this guy was boning me for three days straight. IwishI was the one he was fucking, because then at least I was getting some.
No. He was fucking his girlfriend. All day. All night.
You ever stay in a share house before? It’s the only way to stay in Tokyo for a month or two, in my humble opinion. You can rent a private room in a share house for a month and spendlessthan a hotel room for half that time. So, if you’re paying a grand on plane tickets, you might as well spring for a month-long trip and make the best of your stay. This was actually my second time, although the first time in this particular share house.
Japanese houses have the thinnest walls. They must be the origin ofpaper thin walls,and that paper is made out of rice. Even so, you know that going into a share house situation. You know that you’ll hear them snoring, and that they’ll hear you when you catch the cough everyone on the subway had. It’s a part of life. But unlike a college dorm situation, the people in a share house tend to skew older and more mature.
You hope, anyway.
Hearing my neighbor have sex was not unexpected. Like I said, these people were adults and had adult lives. Sometimes it can’t be helped – you’ve gotta go back to your crappy dorm room to get off with your girl. (Never mind we were in the country full of love hotels, but I’ll get to that later.) Damn be your neighbors.
Damn be me, because this wasn’t a one-time thing to giggle over. This was every two hours for three days straight.
Think I’m kidding? I’m not. My neighbor and his girlfriend were sex machines. From the moment I walked into my room after a day of doing touristy stuff, I was treated to the grunts, groans, andwailsof two twenty-somethings rutting like animals. Before I came to Japan, I had no idea how to talk dirty in French. After I left Japan, I knew how to make a girl come – but don’t quote me on my accent.
Here’s the crazy thing that led to everyone in the share house thinking they (or the guy, at least) had some serious addiction. They’d fuck, get off, roll over and fall asleep – I know, because he snored – and then two hours later their alarms went off and they fucked again.
I’m not kidding. They woke themselves up every two hours to have sex. For 12-15 hours straight.
I can’t make this shit up. When I realized what was going on, I wanted to scream at them. How fucking dare they! Some of us were trying tosleep,for God’s sake. My natural sleep rhythm puts me between four in the morning and noon. These two were going at it until late in the morning. Do you know what having to constantly listen to two people have sex is like? When you’re trying to sleep?
Let me guess what you’re thinking right now.“What about eeaaar pluuuuugs, Cynnnndiiii.”Bugger off. Ear plugs don’t do shit, are you kidding me? I bought two pairs and neither one of them even dulled the moaning and bed creaking! Not even a little bit! My next grab for peace was installing a white noise app on my phone and plugging in my (uncomfortable) headphones, but the internet was so spotty (and obviously I did not have data in a foreign country) that it didn’t work most of the time.
Besides, the problem wasn’t the actual sex noises as much as it was that damned piece of shit bed hitting my wall every two seconds.
Bang! Bang! Bang!Grunt, growl, ejaculate. Snore. Rinse and repeat two hours later.
That bed banging made my room shake more than the two earthquakes I tried to sleep through while I was there. Shit fell off my desk. The clock on the wall rattled. I’m pretty sure dust fell from the ceiling. (Speaking of my upstairs neighbor, the only thing I ever heard was the occasional flushing of the toilet right above my head.) No matter what I did, going deaf would not have stopped those idiots next door from keeping me awake for three days in a row.
By that third night, friends, I had serious sleep anxiety. Which is sad, because occasionally they took a four hour (four whole hours!) break that I could’ve gotten some serious sleep in, but by that time my brain was wired to expect the worst every time I closed my eyes.“What’s the point, Cyndi? They’re going to wake you up again. You’re not going to sleep again, and tomorrow you’ll be so tired and dead at work that you’ll be crying in a Japanese Starbucks. Again.”
So when they started having sex again at 5am, I lost my cool.
“Shut the fuck up!” I shouted through the wall. I leaped out of the bed and took the one step necessary to our shared wall. After I gave it a hearty pounding (har, har,) I yelled at them to please, please stop having sex because some of us really wanted to sleep!
Trust me, by that point I had lost my mind to fatigue and had no sense of shame. Clearly, these people had no shame either. I’ve heard some stereotypical stuff about the French before, but this took the cake.
Suffice to say, those assholes did not give up their fornicating reign.
What does a girl do when she hasn’t slept in three days because her neighbors are horny assholes? Why, she goes to her Facebook and rants about it to anyone who will listen.
“Please save me, I haven’t slept in three days. Neighbors are still having sex.”
Most people feel for you. Others try to be slick and suggest that they’re stamina training or going for a baby. Because that totally makes it okay!
Then you get those who are convinced this guy must have his girlfriend tied up in his room and is using her as a sex slave. (Why am I not calling the police, though?) Or that the girlfriend doesn’t actually exist and we are witnessing one French man’s descent into sexual madness. (That’s some serious arthouse, though.) Me? I didn’t care if this guy was jacking off to porn. (And he did. Often. I could give you details about that too.) I cared that he was forcing me to be an unwilling audience to his sex life and keeping me from a basic bodily function while his went into overdrive.
I felt powerless. And full of petty revenge. When those two things collide, you make some interesting life choices.
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