Schrödinger’s Eviction

You might have heard about the earthquake that hit Pozzuoli on 31/7.
What you might not know is that, a few days later, I received an eviction order from the city. Fun stuff, right?
But don’t worry, reader, I’ll tell you how it all went down.

Friday 31/7, 19:47

The earthquake has just happened and I am scared to death. I’ve seen my fair share of earthquakes since moving to Pozzuoli two years ago, and I’ve grown accustomed to them, but this one? Oh boy. Maybe it was because I was in the middle of a nap when it happened, but afterwards I was actually trembling from fear. My biggest concern, of course, is the dog. He’s not usually scared or even bothered by earthquakes, but since he was also napping, I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t too startled. Of course, he was fine and not even a little bit shaken. He just had sleepy eyes and plaster dust on his head. Cutie.

As soon as the terror passes, I start checking for damage around the house. Nothing is really broken. Sure, there are a few cracks in the walls, but they’re all superficial, and some stuff has fallen down, but through some miracle, nothing fragile has broken. I’m okay. I get calls from my concerned friends and offers from various family members asking if I would feel more comfortable sleeping at their place, but since it really doesn’t seem like much has happened, I opt to stay at my apartment.

Monday 03/08, 17:41

I get a phone call from my landlord. Apparently, her brother-in-law heard from another tenant that they’re evicting everyone for safety reasons. I immediately freak the fuck out because my poor dog is home alone. The problem is, my landlord doesn’t actually know if it’s true either. She doesn’t trust this other tenant, and neither does her brother-in-law, so she asks me to check. Of course, I’m at work and can’t exactly go investigate. I call the only neighbor whose number I have. No answer.

I’m imagining firefighters at my building escorting everyone out and putting up seals, all while my poor dog is trapped in the apartment. Maybe he’s scared. Maybe he’s looking for me. More likely, he’s peacefully sleeping.

My landlord realizes the error of her ways. Yes, I’m probably the most trustworthy person, but I am also prone to panic attacks. She tries to reassure me that the other tenant is probably lying, that I don’t need to leave work early, and that Tatanka is fine. But I’m not really thinking at this point, so I call my father five times until he finally picks up and decides to enable my crazy by bringing me to the building.

Of course, nothing is going on. I’m obviously relieved, and I even start joking with my father. Until my fucking neighbor finally responds to my increasingly panicked messages with a two-minute voice note.

To make a long story short, the eviction is, in fact, real.

So how come the atmosphere was so calm? The inhabitants of the building had just refused to leave. And they had their reasons. First of all, nobody had officially been notified about the eviction order. Some people had just come in that morning to shut off the utilities, which understandably made my fellow neighbors lose their shit because, at that point, nobody knew what the fuck was going on. A bit later, some people (not clear if they were the same people who wanted to shut off the utilities or entirely new characters) showed up with the eviction order, signed by the mayor. My neighbors, unconvinced, straight-up refused to leave, and that was that.

I, surprisingly the cautious one in this particular group, decide to go fuck off to my parents’ house. Yes, the eviction order was real and could be found on the city’s official website. But nobody had actually brought it to the attention of the building manager, which apparently is a big deal, and it wasn’t clear whether the piece of paper that had been brought over actually had any validity. Or had it lost all meaning because of the stubbornness of the other tenants? I was evicted and yet, at the same time, I wasn’t.

Tuesday 04/08

I’m alone at my parents’ house. My brother has left for Thailand, so I technically have the whole place to myself. It should be basically the same as being at my apartment. But it doesn’t feel that way.

I’m trying as hard as I can to think about anything but what’s happening. People are sending me messages, and they’re being incredibly kind. They want me to know that if I need a place to stay, they’ll be there. But in my heart, I know the truth. I have to stay with my parents. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

Of course, if I really wanted to stay with somebody else, I could. They couldn’t exactly stop me. But my mom would be devastated, and my father? My father can argue that it doesn’t make much sense for me to go anywhere else when I still have to go to work with him every morning. He wouldn’t be wrong.

So I spend the day rewatching Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, the most devastating piece of media I’ve ever consumed, to decompress. My thinking is that if I make myself miserable enough watching fictional people suffer, maybe there won’t be any room left in my brain to think about my own problems. Apart from that, I do nothing all day. I don’t even eat.

Wednesday 05/08

I go with my mother to grab some clothes from my house, and I just start crying. And crying. And crying. You might think this is ridiculous, and I get why. A lot of people were evicted after the earthquake, many of them families with nowhere else to go. Me, a twenty-something single person with a perfectly good room at my parents’ house? Hardly a tragedy.

Still, there is a reason why I moved out. I love my parents, of course, and this isn’t necessarily about them. Maybe it’s the house itself. I just tend to hibernate in my room when I’m there. I lock myself in and sleep and sleep. I do nothing all day and can’t seem to function properly. I get testy and irritable for no real reason. It’s like as soon as I’m back in that bed, as soon as I’m back in that room, I go back to 2022.

Maybe I should bring this up with a therapist? Let’s put a pin in that.

Thursday 06/08

I get a message from my landlord, an incredible, insane message. Apparently, all of this has just been a big misunderstanding and our building is doing fine. The firefighters just wrote down the wrong address. Which I feel like is an insane thing to do? Maybe double-checking the address before evicting an entire building would have been nice. Just a thought.

And now I’m realizing just how ridiculous this whole thing is. I spent the past few days crying and packing clothes, genuinely thinking my life had just been turned upside down for the foreseeable future. I was already mentally preparing myself for this to be a long-term situation, only to find out that I was never actually evicted in the first place. Italian bureaucracy, baby.

Of course, now I can’t stop wondering about the building that was actually supposed to be evacuated. Did they ever clear it? Or were those people just sitting at home, completely unaware that they were supposed to be somewhere else?

So, was I evicted? Yes. No. Maybe?
The eviction order was real, but the damage to my building was completely fictional.

Which is honestly very reassuring for me and absolutely terrifying for whoever lives at the correct address.