HY. My Sunday Lovers,

I thought my biggest problem was getting my Bachelor’s thesis done. Turns out I was living next to one.

Like apparently every girl, I have a holy Friday-night ritual. A little self-care liturgy, if you will: something delicious for dinner, a glass of red wine (or more, at least we’re counting glasses, not bottles), and the latest episodes of Law & Order: SVU.

And like apparently every girl, I’m completely in love with Olivia Benson. Strong. Approachable. Independent. Goddamn smart. The woman who walks into human darkness and still somehow stays human.

Little did I know how close I was to becoming her. And how close I was to… a dead body.

Because while I was writing my final Bachelor’s thesis, I was basically trapped in my tiny one-room apartment with the scent of a corpse seeping in through the wall.

And because the universe clearly has a dark sense of humor, it happened right before Easter. Good Friday. The whole resurrection thing.

Only this time, nobody got up.

It’s a sad story. And it changed me in a way I still can’t fully explain.

 

TO BE FAIR: I WAS A WALKING TO-DO LIST WITH A LOW BATTERY AND NO CHARGER

To be fair, my life at that point was a rollercoaster. I had a full-time job as a consultant at a brand and communications agency, fighting for a promotion, and I was studying full-time on the side business administration and business psychology.

I had just started working with a new client, and I still had to finish my Bachelor’s thesis on Emotional Intelligence and Women’s Leadership Success.

In other words: I wasn’t a person. I was a shell with brain matter, moving through my day like a checklist with legs.

My apartment was small but efficient. One room for living and eating, which meant my dining table turned into my work desk. My desk sat directly against the wall that separated my place from my neighbor’s.

Little did I know I was sitting next to a dead body.

How many times did I lean my head against that wall to think? To breathe? To not cry?

Perfect Routine, Perfect Blindness.

I had optimized my days for maximum output: Wake up. Coffee. Office. Groceries. Dinner. Four hours of writing and research.

On weekends, those nine hours of work simply became nine hours of studying. And inside that tunnel, I didn’t even notice the smell changing at first.

I’m a very clean person. My friends would say I have a obsession with cleaning. I care about how things look, how they feel, how they smell. I love fresh laundry. Not that aggressive fabric-softener perfume that punches you in the face, but real clean. Simple. Fresh.

But slowly, something shifted.

My skin got worse. It got so bad I felt like my face had time-traveled back to sixteen like with pimples, acne… the whole thing. My clothes started to smell… off. A little musty. A little wrong.

I noticed the symptoms for sure, but I couldn’t place them. And honestly? I didn’t want to. I kept telling myself: I’ll deal with it when I have time again.

MY LOVELY NEIGHBOR, AND HIS ROSES

Living in a big city has advantages. But the biggest downside is the anonymity. You recognize faces. You nod. You do the little polite waves and small talk. But you don’t know people for real.

My neighbor was the perfect neighbor.

An older man, maybe around 60. Alone, from what I could tell. We communicated through small rituals: accepting each other’s packages, polite balcony nods during morning coffees. He took real pride in his balcony plants - beautiful roses, always cared for. He was also the person I’d ask for help when I needed something “handy” done and I was alone. (Yes, I am that independent woman. I love the whole ‘I can do it myself’ thing… but sometimes the screws still win.)

Once, I tried to replace my toilet seat. I didn’t have enough strength to loosen the screws, my hand slipped, and I basically peeled my skin open. I sat there with a bleeding hand, a broken toilet seat, and a bladder that was starting to panic.

So I did what any self-respecting young woman would do: I rang my neighbor’s doorbell.

He didn’t speak my language fluently, but he saw the blood immediately, saw the screwdriver, saw me gesturing toward my bathroom like a tragic mime, and he came over without hesitation. He took the old seat off, installed the new one, and left like it was the most normal thing in the world.

A few days later, I baked him a small cake as a thank you.

I genuinely liked him. I liked our small everyday moments.

Which makes the next part even worse.

THE PART I STILL FEEL ASHAMED ABOUT

I didn’t notice his absence for three months.

THREE MONTHS!!!

That’s the sentence that sits in my chest like a stone: I did not notice his absence for three months.

It was early April, shortly before Easter, when the police knocked on my door and asked me about my neighbor. Another neighbor across the street had reported that his balcony door had been open since mid-to-late January, which is unusual for winter, obviously.

And suddenly, everything snapped into place.

The smell. The skin. The weird heaviness. The open balcony door. The silence.

The wall.

THE SMELL. OR WHEN YOUR BRAIN REFUSES TO CONNECT THE DOTS.

In mid-March we had one of those unexpectedly gorgeous days. Sunny and around 17°C. When I came home, the air smelled… unfamiliar. Sour-sweet. Wrong. Not like food. Not like trash. Something else.

But I lived in a multicultural building. People cooked all kinds of things. And I didn’t want to judge anyone’s spices or meals. So I ignored it.

My skin kept getting worse, so I washed a load at 60°C and hung it on the balcony.

A little later, I stepped outside again to hang more clothes.

And that’s when the smell hit me properly.

It was nauseating. It reminded me of manure like cow poop, the way it smells on farm fields back in my hometown. Except this time, we weren’t on a farm field. We were in a big city.

My brain still didn’t make the connection. It couldn’t. It wouldn’t.

So I did what I did with everything back then: I shoved it into the “later” folder.

Two weeks after that, something similar happened. I was working from home, had laundry on the balcony again, and by midday the smell was so disgusting I felt sick.

And again, I thought: I’ll fix it after I finish my thesis.

But the police didn’t want to wait for my deadline.

AND SUDDENLY, ALL THE PUZZLE PIECES FELL INTO PLACE!

They rang my doorbell in early April. Police at my door isn’t completely shocking in this kind of neighborhood. If you’re paying for a private university while working full-time and living in the city, you don’t exactly have budget left for a “pretty” area.

They asked about my neighbor. When did I last see him?

And in that moment, all the puzzle pieces fell into place with the sickest little click.

I had been living next to a dead body.

For months.

I had dried my laundry in what I can only call corpse air for at least a month. No wonder everything felt off. No wonder my skin felt like it was protesting my entire existence. I literally dried my face towels in corpse air and then washed my face with them every day. “Bon appétit”, my skin said to me. Sarcastic, obviously.

And the most absurd part?

Every Friday night I watched SVU and admired Olivia Benson solving crimes around dead bodies… while one was literally next to me.

I even moved my 30th birthday plans to a murder mystery dinner at home because I’d had a weird gut feeling. Call it intuition, badly misinterpreted. Apparently my neighbor’s message from the universe came through, but I misread it completely. I took a wrong turn somewhere. Completely.

GOODBYE TO A NICE MAN. THANK YOU.

That night, I lit a candle for him and placed it on my windowsill.

Nobody should be left alone long enough to become… a case.

Nobody should disappear quietly like that. I will remember you as my wonderful neighbor.

I hope he knew he mattered. And I hope he’s somewhere quiet and gentle now.

CORPORATE LIFE DOESN’T PAUSE FOR TRAUMA

The next day I had an important business meeting. My favorite business outfit was still drying outside.

Well, I knew what that smell was now. I knew. But deadlines don’t pause for trauma, and corporate life does not accept “Sorry, my blazer smells like existential horror.”

So I wore it.

The next morning, I got into the car with my colleagues, turned on the seat heater, and said, dead serious:

“Do you smell that? That’s a dead body. I lived next to one for three months.”

There was silence.

The kind of silence where you realize you’ve just said something that cannot be un-said. But that’s just how I am. This is how I process what happens to me. The same way I’m telling you this story right now. And trust me, there are more stories we’ll have to get through together.

EASTER WEEKEND: A THESIS DEADLINE AND A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF “DEAD”(and smell)

Over the Easter holidays, I was stuck in my apartment.

After they opened my neighbor’s door, the smell that had been sealed inside for months moved into the hallway and then into my place. It was like it crawled into everything.

I felt sick. Everything smelled like it. My bedroom. My bathroom. My living area. My clothes. My hair. Even my thoughts, honestly.

And still, I had a thesis deadline.

And you might ask yourself why I didn’t just leave, right?

Well, first of all, my family lived 480 km away, so that wasn’t exactly an option. And second, my apartment was perfectly set up to get my work done. My computer, an extra monitor, and all the books I needed spread out and open to the right pages. It was basically a full research-and-writing office, and packing that up overnight was not exactly simple.

And you know that feeling when you need your familiar environment to fully focus? New places would’ve just distracted me. Like a café. I would’ve ended up people-watching the whole time and then needing to pee every five minutes, just because of I can’t leave your stuff unattended.

So I sat at that desk, right next to that wall, and finished it.

Because that’s what I knew how to do at the time: keep going, even when the world was telling me to stop.

 

WHAT THIS CHANGED IN ME

The point of this story isn’t shock value.

It’s not “look how crazy my life is” (even though… ja, it’s kinda).

It’s this: Nobody should be forgotten like that.

Everyone deserves someone checking in. Someone noticing. Someone caring enough to knock.

I wasn’t the best watcher. I can admit that. But I’m trying to become better.

Some time later, I decided to move back to my hometown. Back to my family. To my siblings and their families. My mom used to call it the sea turtle effect (there will be another story about it).

Because I don’t want to be the “successful but probably crazy” cat aunt who pops up once or twice a year and everyone says, “Oh, she’s doing her thing,” and then one day she’s gone and no one notices.

I want to be close to my people.

I want someone to ask how I’m doing.

I want my friends and family to remember me… and my stories.

And I guess that’s why I’m here. Because from now on, I’m going to tell you my stories every Sunday.

Happy Sunday! x
Victoria