No one likes to think of himself as a Peeping Tom. A guy wants to be a decent fellow. But when I lived in my squalorous rented room, my window afforded me a view so attractive and magnetic that I found I could only divert my gaze with great effort. It was like how it is when there’s a television going in the room. Try as you might to concentrate on something else, your eyes just automatically drift in its flickering, mesmerizing direction.
Not that my view was of anything untoward or X-rated. It was simply of a girl working at her drawing table across the way. The private, inner reaches of her apartment were out of sight to me. But the alcove where she worked was at the exact same level as mine, lined up like a little parallel universe, as if whoever had built our buildings had intended for our windows to correspond across the intervening space by way of a corridor of uninterrupted vision, the same way the Egyptians used to line up their monuments with the sun and the moon.
I would sit at my desk, writing distracted poems, while she sat at hers, drawing. And although a great expanse lay between us, and the business of the streets passed below, it sometimes felt as if we were in the same room, shoulder to shoulder, both toiling at our craft like secret sharers on a common mission to harness the mystery of the universe. Windows began to play prominently in what I was writing, and blond hair. I began work on a clumsy, oblique poem in which a young man attempts to walk a tightrope stretched between his window and another glowing window far away. Very clever.
She knew I was there, too. Sometimes she would wave to me and smile, and I would wave back. Sometimes she would hold up her teacup in my direction, and nod. So it wasn’t as if it were a one-sided affair. We were in league somehow. It felt nice. It felt friendly.
This went on for a few weeks. Nothing changed in our comfortable arrangement. But like all boy-girl relationships, no matter how unusual, there comes that inevitable moment when one must decide if it’s going to move beyond friendship and become something more. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that way just yet – I was still enjoying our benevolent camaraderie – but then the stars moved into place and the moment was subtly forced to its crisis.

It was late. A November night. I was tired and ready for bed. (A long day of poetry can really wear you out.) I turned off the lights. And then after a big yawn and stretch, I stood for a moment in the center of my room and peered out my window. I saw that the girl was still working at her table. It occurred to me that I could see her, but she couldn’t see me. Whereas I had always been afraid to stare before, I could now watch her freely. I could learn more about her, get a better sense of who this enigmatic being was by how she moved and held herself when she thought herself to be alone.
She had a nice, studied way of holding her pencils when she drew. She was left-handed. Her posture was perfect. She was pretty. She kept her hair tucked behind her ears. Everything else I learned, everything I believed I could infer – that she was lonely, that she was earnest, that she was somewhat sad – I gleaned from those few objective details.
I watched her through my window. It didn’t feel wrong in the moment. I was too spellbound to realize how inappropriate I was being until she did something that caused me to pause. After some time, she laid down her tools, stretched her arms above her head, and then stepped to her window, facing out.
She stood for a long time, arms crossed over her chest, looking across the square toward my window.
My room was cold; I held myself still.
She made the slightest gesture, a little nod of her head and a whisper, in the manner of a familiar goodnight.
Then she turned away and flipped out the lights.
Her window went black.
I shivered.
I continued to stand in the center of my room. Had she seen me? No. She simply knew I was there. Perhaps she had done the same thing herself a time or two. Maybe she had secretly watched me writing my poems from her darkened window. And so she knew me, I realized. Who I was. In fact, in that moment, she seemed to be the one person in the whole world who knew me best of all. It was an odd sensation, all mixed up with joy and gravity.
Eventually, I crawled into my bed. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about what had just happened, wondering what her name was, imagining her voice, until at last I slipped into a dizzying dream of tightropes and falling and flying away.