The woman in the other apartment has the same kettle. She must, because every morning at six-fourteen the pipes sing the same note mine does — that particular B-flat that means someone opened the tap all the way, which you only do for a kettle.
I don't know her name. I've seen her twice: once by the mailboxes, once at the corner where our building meets the sidewalk. Both times she was carrying the same canvas bag with what looked like textbooks. Both times she didn't see me.
This is not a story about her.
This is a story about the fact that I almost moved into 4C instead of 4D. The agent showed me both. 4C faces east, gets morning light, has a slightly larger bathroom. 4D faces west, costs forty dollars less, has the pipe problem. I chose on price. Forty dollars.
In 4C I would never have heard her kettle. I would have heard, instead, the family in 3C — a child who practices recorder on Saturday mornings, badly and with commitment. I would have learned to sleep through it. I would have become, over months, a person who sleeps through recorder practice, which is a different kind of person than one who wakes to the B-flat of a stranger's kettle.
This is also not a story about me.
It's a story about the forty dollars. About how small the difference is between the person I became and the person I didn't. Both of them real. Both of them possible. Separated by an amount of money I spend on dinner once a month without thinking.
My sister says I overthink things. She says this lovingly, the way you say it to someone who will never stop. She chose her apartment because it had a bathtub. She is now a person who takes baths, who buys bath salts and reads in the tub, who met her girlfriend at a bath products store. The bathtub didn't cause any of this. It just gave it somewhere to happen.
If you zoom in on the boundary — on the exact moment of choosing, the hinge where one life becomes another — it gets more complicated, not less. Every point on the boundary is itself a boundary. You can always go closer, always find a finer distinction between this life and that one. The question "why this one?" has no bottom.
The kettle sings. Six-fourteen. I don't know if she's happy. I don't know if I'm happy. These seem like the wrong questions — too large, too settled. What I know is that I'm the version of me that hears a B-flat every morning, and that this has shaped me in ways I can't inventory because they're the shape of the inventory itself.
Somewhere in 4C, the version I didn't become is sleeping through recorder practice.
He doesn't miss me. He doesn't know I'm here.
That's not sad. It's just the topology.