i dunno either

so when we signed the lease there was like. a really bad gas leak in here

that’s not actually relevant to the story I just want you to know what type of person I am

anyway when we were moving in the woman in the apartment right next to us, tiny old lady, walks up to my mom and says “Oh, it’ll be so nice to have neighbors again! Especially after what happened last time….”

and then she just. walked into her home and didn’t elaborate. 

she hasn’t spoken a word to us since.

it’s been like 10 months

there are two secret doors in my closet. Like, ‘Get Out’ secret doors. 

I’m literally?? Allergic to this apartment? And we can’t figure out why??? 

like it’s not dusty and I asked the office if the last person who lived here had a cat, but they said no and also all the rugs were deep cleaned before we moved in so I just uhhh….can’t breathe in my own home that’s great. I literally have to take multiple allergy meds every single day or else I just. stop breathing. it’s fun.

my room is like….90% hotter than the rest of the apartment and we can’t figure out why. Like, even the building’s repair guy came in here one time and was like ‘wtf’ it’s a REALLY noticeable temperature change even when I just step out into the hallway

sometimes the doors just like….unlock themselves??? like I’ve literally locked the deadbolt, walked away, and came back a few minutes later and it’s unlocked 

the building’s basement is a storage area but it’s also literally straight up out of a murder movie I’m not even kidding like everyone refuses to go down there

and the thing is…because of where my bedroom is located, every time a door opens and closes in the building I hear it, so I always know when people are like in and out

but sometimes my mom will get home from work and be like ‘why is the basement door open’ (the entrance door is right across from us like I can see it if I look out the peep hole) and I’ll go check and YEAH it’s open and pitch black all you can see are the top of the stairs…but the thing is, nearly every time this happens, I hadn’t heard the door open, and I hadn’t heard anyone else leave their apartments. which is. literally impossible?? so uh there’s that

if you open up the fridge, the door stays open until you physically close it, even if you only opened it like a crack, it doesn’t budge. but sometimes I open it up and I’ll like, turn around for a second and while I’m not looking it just SLAMS shut.

uh as I’m typing this Bollywood music just started blasting from directly above me only like….the dude that lives there isn’t home so idk why that’s happening

every now and then I hear a fox (or some other animal that makes That Sound idk) screaming outside my window but there is literally…no where around here for a forest creature to show up from like. we’re on a busy road where is this poor thing coming from???

there’s been a few times where I’m awake at like the really early hours of the morning and everything is dead quiet and all the sudden I hear a train’s whistle blowing, sounding close enough that if I looked out the window I could see it, except, we’re literally no where near a train station??? maybe the polar express is looking for someone around here idk

there’s two mirrors in my bathroom right. The big one over the sink, and then the one over the medicine cabinet that faces the shower, so when you’re at the sink you get double reflections of every thing, and it REALLY makes me uncomfortable because I’ve always been creeped out by mirrors right

so anyway a couple months ago I was in the shower, and I needed to get something that I forgot to bring in so I opened up the curtain….and I just….didn’t have a reflection in the mirror??? 

like I saw an open curtain, a tile wall, running water. I was just. Not in the picture….don’t like that.

all the walls are white and there’s big windows everywhere so you’d think it’d be like. a Light apartment right. but it’s not??? like we have lamps all over the place and it’s still SO DARK, it’s like the walls are eating the light

one time I had my friend Raychel over and I was explaining how weird it was to her, and then I was like ‘it’s getting dark outside I’ll just show you’ and I turned on the lights and….the room got bright as fuck

every inch of the room bathed in light, completely disregarding every thing I had just told her about it….I was literally So Angry lmao

mysterious pieces of metal just kinda show up in the garbage disposal??? like all the sudden it’ll stop working so we’ll call the repair guy and he’ll just find these weird ass looking shards of metal that are Not Coming From Us and he’s just like ‘hm. that’s weird.’ every time like??

the entrances to get into the complex are like….weirdly hidden lmao no one can ever get here on their first try

I ALWAYS feel like I’m being watched in my room like every time I have my back to the window it’s like I can feel eyes burning into me and every time I check I don’t see anything so at first it’s like, okay, I’m just being paranoid, but the thing is like. If I’m in my mom’s room I don’t have this problem?? If I’m in the living room which is 50% window, I don’t have this problem??? Like it’s literally just this one space and I don’t understand why

the actual layout of the complex like….doesn’t make sense lmao like driving around from one entrance to the other? simple, clean cut, it’s fine. walking around??? a fucking maze. you start to notice like…buildings where the placement doesn’t make any sense??? and then you’re like ‘wait…where exactly tf does my backyard come out to’ and the answer Doesn’t Make Sense and then you realize you realize the route you take to the main office to drop off the rent check is somehow a little different every time you take it and all in all I might be living in a lowkey labyrinth or some shit idk man

one time it was late at night and I had parked all the way at the end of the parking lot, so furthest from the building but I was still standing Directly Straight In Front Of The Building okay and I start walking towards the door. And as I’m like midway there, I briefly looked behind me for a second, and when I turned back a second later I saw someone in all black with the hood pulled over their face speed walking away past the steps, and like I glanced away for another second, then it hit me what I saw so I turned back, and absolutely no one was there. Idk if I explained that well enough but essentially in the brief seconds it took me to do a double take, someone appeared and disappeared. There wasn’t enough time for them to have left my line of sight altogether and there wasn’t even really any place for them to go, and then I realized they were walking like, BEHIND the bushes and trees line, so like right in front of the windows, and the spot he was walking away from…had to be my bedroom window??? I’m literally still so creeped out about it help

- the gas leak is not still happening. I am not just hallucinating things from a gas leak. we’ve been living here too long. we would’ve died already. I only bothered mentioning it because it seemed very ‘Stupid Main Character Ignores A Warning Right Off The Bat’-ish and I wanted to make it clear that I Know I’m like this lmao

- yes, we have a carbon monoxide detector 

- no, there’s no mold or anything, but there is a lot of tree coverage, so honestly that’s probably the issue

- okay so like we bought curtains for all over but the thing is there’s not room on the wall to attach a tension rod to, so we literally need to drill something into the wall to hang curtains on but neither of us think it’d be a good idea if we did that so my mom keeps trying to call her handyman but he keeps running away to Italy and not answering her calls so like. curtains are in our possession but out of use right now. but there ARE blinds so it’s not like we’re just open to the world 24/7 you know? When I’m in the driveway I absolutely cannot see into my bedroom. They’re functioning blinds….still get that Feeling though 

Also, some fun additions since I made this post:

I’ve been finding like. A lot of dead flies on the window sills

There’s now been a couple instances where I’m in either my room or the bathroom and I’ll hear my mother say something, only I can’t make out what she’s saying, but like, I know what her VOICE sounds like you know, so I’ll open the door to ask her what she said and she either didn’t say anything, was asleep, or wasn’t even home so uh. Not loving that! 

So like, the light timer for the building is always messed up- it’s always on during the day and dark at night. No matter how many times they send someone out to fix it, it never sticks. And you just kinda think, wow, this apartment complex isnreally shitty with electricity. And you move on.

But then you go out and come home in the dead of night and you see Every Single Other Building has the lights on and yours just looks like a black hole in the middle..

Also, nothing is creepier than standing alone in a pitch black hallway, so dark you can’t see your own hand in front of your face, and as you’re struggling to get your key in the door you hear the basement door slowly start to open behind you, but you can’t hear walking or breathing or anything and then when you finally get your door open and the light spills out you see there’s absolutely no one there!! NOT FUN!!

- my mom has now had several instances where she’s been woken up by the feeling of someone grabbing hee feet- she’s certain it’s my dad Sending A Sign, but like, my mom has super gross feet and my dad always joked about how he didn’t like them so I cannot picture a world where he’d wanna touch them even in a non corporeal way lmfao

- one time when my friend was over there was an unexplainable, super clear, knock on the back door when absolutely no one was there (or even in the surrounding apartments!) HOWEVER the friend in question was getting into witchcraft and was getting signs from a deity that wanted her to worship them (she THINKS it was Persephone) so like, that’s probably what was going on there

- still multiple occasions where I’ll hear my mom talking (without being able to make out what she’s saying) but when I check she’s either asleep or not even home

2 more instances of people disappearing right in front of me in the parking lot! yay!

my mom claims she saw a shadowy cloud slowly float around when she was laying on the couch but she was very chill with it

this afternoon, I was napping on the couch and was woken up by a clear loud knocking! no one at the front door or back door. the more I looked around for it the more it sounded like it was coming from inside the walls! 🙃 I was like ‘maybe the upstairs neighbor is doing something’ but it was like….a very consistent knocking, not what it usually sounds when the lady upstairs is hammering something, and when I knocked back on the ceiling it didn’t stop but it DID change the knock pattern. whole thing went on for like maybe 3 minutes??

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.