My friend’s room is flooded to the neck. She keeps complaining, but doesn’t seem to want to move out.
We give her a contact number for someone to drain the room, and someone to fix the pipes. She does not go through with it. We call the guy for her, she doesn’t open the door. She says the water will pour out if she does. The only thing she does is shut the space under her door so water doesn't come out to the corridor. She lives on a floating duck, and sometimes the duck deflates and we come to help her fill it with more air with a pump from outside her window. We get her food and deliver it through the window. She goes out sometimes, to concerts and the cinema, but eats, works, and sleeps on the inflatable duck.
It gets in the way sometimes, I would have to stop what I do and help her inflate her duck, and I just wish she would get someone to drain the water. She could do it from outside the window. You know, put a hose in there and suck the water inside. But she says she’s busy, or she’s tired, and has no time to get the man to suck the water from inside her flooded room. And then she complains that she has to swim to reach the window to her bathroom, which she uses because she can’t open the door to the bathroom, otherwise it will get flooded. Like FOR GOD’S SAKE just drain it. She asks to crash my couch every few weeks and I let her. I care for her, I like her company. Sometimes I go into her room to swim in the flood too, holding my breath a few seconds longer than I can. But like, come on. Drain it. It’s not like you can’t sacrifice a day off of work just to call a guy to drain the water that is literally flooding to your neck.
Some guy just pours water into her room. He thinks if she’s cool with the room flooded like that, she wouldn’t mind just getting a few more litres of water every day. And he’s really stubborn. She has yelled at him, a couple times too much, to stop pouring water on her already flooded room, but he keeps doing it. I try too sometimes but he told me to mind my own business.
I gave her a couple of plants. I put it in front of the window so she can have a little something to see, not just her walls that have started moulding because of the humidity inside her room, but mainly so she can use her abundance of water to water the plants every day. She does it sometimes, and I gave her a bunch of plants so it does help, but draining the water and moving out would help a lot more. I mean, I try to convince her, but she has all these reasons and excuses to not get out of there. Her dad built the flat. Or it’s closer to her workplace, which she goes to once a week for meetings. Or that she’s decorated the place, invested a lot of money for the furniture, which doesn’t make sense because the room’s flooded and it’s all broken anyways, or at least damp. And I try to let her do whatever she wants, only she can help herself.
It’s a shitty living condition. Sometimes while she's floating around inside, chilling, watching some girl eat a bunch of food on her computer, a cockroach swims past her. She yells. ROACH! She says. But it’s a flooded room. There’s gotta be just a lot of bugs swimming around in there. And don’t even start with the mosquitoes. There’s a lot of still water going on in there, so it’s a really great spot for a mosquito to lay some eggs, and for them to hatch. She gets bitten by mosquitoes all the time. Her whole leg is red from mosquito bites. She scratches her legs constantly. For the mosquitoes it’s like you’re born and raised in an all-you-can-eat spot. They think it’s heaven.
I can't really fathom how uncomfortable that might be. I could picture it, she talks about it constantly, but to have your toes permanently wrinkled because it’s in the water for far too long, or to have your head constantly itch because of all the moisture in there, it should suck. She goes to the clinic sometimes to have her skin checked out, or to get some vitamins so she wouldn’t get the flu for being in the water for too long, but the main solution was always to just drain the room.
It kind of feels good sometimes, to get in that room and just float. You get to slow down. It dampens a lot of noise from the outside, so it’s really still and quiet there. And sometimes it’s beautiful. When the sun shines the right way, in the right position, it reflects on the water, and the water reflects it to the ceiling. The plants we put in front of her windows give it some really cool shadows, and the wind moves them. I sometimes go in there just to watch that. It’s art, really. Sometimes I go and hang out, keep her company, watch the ceiling, and help her get a bug or two. I go there to check on the duck, fill it with some more air. Sometimes me and a bunch of friends would go there and have a kind of pool party, with orange juices and snacks balanced on top of a smaller inflatable duck. We would love to drink some booze, but you can’t bathe and drink or you could drown, so we don’t.
And like, I get her. If I were her I think I would be too exhausted from all the swimming and floating. I would not have the energy to do anything about it, because my main focus every day would be to not drown.
These days I’m not actually angry at her, I am just frustrated about the fact that there is not much I can do to help her, except for the occasional meal delivery and duck air pumps.