Friday, January 30, 2009

Blogging from library. Anger. Is this what happened last year and the year before?

My landlord called me back on my cellphone. I didn't have the phone at the time. He explained to the insane woman that, since we only use electric appliances, there can be no carbon monoxide. Since I would rather die than disagree with his opinion, I happily went back into my apartment and shut all the windows, trusting that the dizziness, sleepiness, nausea, nearly-passing-out, hours of headaches, burning throat, collapsing while trying to walk, and inability to think, MUST ALL BE MY IMAGINATION!

Actually, that's not what I did. Mentally, I told him to fuck himself. I didn't say that to him, since I was only hearing the message he left on my voice mail. I left the apartment and have all the windows open and the fan on. It's freezing in there, and all the wind is blowing, yet I still got dizzy when I went in for a couple seconds.

Something similar has happened twice before, and each time, I thought it was my fault. I still can't explain why there is carbon monoxide in my apartment. The one time when my apartment was full of fumes, I went to the homeless shelter. They called my landlord and asked him something along the lines of, 'Is she just crazy? That apartment's just fine, isn't it? No toxic fumes or anything?' (Of course, that's my angry paraphrasing of whatever they really said.) And the landlord said, 'Yep, she's just crazy. That apartment is just fine.' Because the landlord insisted that it was just fine, the homeless shelter told me that I had to pack my stuff, and get out, and go back to my apartment.

That was the time when I thought it was a chemical reaction caused by the borax I used in the laundry. But it happened again the next winter, when I wasn't using borax on the laundry. And it happened again this winter, when I did nothing really unusual. I can think of a couple things it seemed to coincide with. But maybe, all this time, it hasn't been my fault.

It's coming from somewhere. The beeping detector told me it was real.

I reset the detector, so it stopped beeping. I opened all the windows. In order to make the detector beep again, to show my landlord, I will have to close all the windows and leave it there for several hours.

When the beep went off, it was right after I moved the bathroom door, which wafted a breeze of air over the detector. The detector is sitting on top of the water heater. The water heater's closet door is open. The bad air is worst back in that corner. I cannot explain why the bathroom or the electric water heater are producing CO. But it's there. I also thought it could be rising up from something below the apartment.

Why am I still alive? Because when I say that something is wrong, I listen to that observation instead of listening to someone else tell me that nothing is wrong. Maybe I can't explain it, but I'm alive because I kept insisting that something really was wrong, even though I knew that it didn't make sense in the situation.

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