Do you ever wonder why they keep the lights on in a lot of apartment hallways all night? You might think it’s a kind of courtesy to the tenants, you know coming home late at night a bit tipsy, it’s nice not to have to stumble through the way to your door.
But think about that. Landlords, as a breed of humans, are generally some of the cheapest bastards you’ll ever know. Just try to get a shutter replaced, or the hot water valve fixed, and you’ll understand the weeks-long battle you have to go through for every minor repair. You might think, especially how now everyone has a flashlight on their phone, and a phone in everyone’s pocket, that landlords would start saving some money by turning off the lights.
But there they are: lights on in most every apartment complex, condo, hotel, and fleabag motel across the world. The light might be sickly, fluorescent and buzzing, or sliding through the corners of your front door from the outside. But it’s on.
You have to remember that temporary living places are naturally on the tilted, thin side when it comes to the material universe. I’m not just talking the natural echoes every place gets when a soul has been there for a bit. That’s natural enough, and can even be cozy. They happen when a place is touched by a human, connected to us, made real in a way.
The hallways in and outside most apartments were designed for a different reason. They are designed to not be places, to be empty canvases for people to pass through, faceless, on their own journeys. No marks on the walls to show how big the kids have grown. No family photos. Knicks and scratches are made by strangers, and patched up quickly.
A non-place like that wasn’t really meant for people. And so the not-people come to stay.
You might think this is crazy. But think for a second: do you remember what the color of the flooring is outside your apartment? Really remember the color of the walls or siding? The brain filters out a lot of stuff. Like the shadows that move in the corners of the hallways, in the light that steals in from the front door.
That’s where the lights come in. It’s the last bastion of a place being for humans. If the lights are on, it stands to reason somebody’s home. Everybody knows that.
But the question becomes, what happens if the lights are turned off, and the hallways truly become a non-space? It happens, occasionally, in cheaper housing projects. And sure, maybe you have to be a little crazy after a while, living in a cheap apartment, where you’re never sure if the locks will hold, and the mirrors are all scratched, and the lights go out deep in the night.
Maybe you have to be a little crazy, hearing the things that shuffle, their movements just at the lowest frequency of human hearing.
Be glad the lights are on outside your apartment. And don’t spend too long staring at the light beneath the door. Remember that you are home, right? In the space you own.
For now.