The window relationship began by accident. My lamp — a thrift-store floor lamp with a crooked shade — sat in the only corner my studio allowed, which happened to face her window directly. I noticed her noticing it in February: her blinds, usually shut by 11, stayed cracked. Then open. Then she started sitting near her window with a book she never turned pages of.
We developed rituals without agreeing to. My lamp on meant I was home. Her blinds open meant the same. Some nights we’d both be at our windows, phones in hand, not calling each other because we had no number, no name, no legitimate excuse — just two rectangles of warm light across four feet of alley.
The signs started in August. First one: HI. I nearly dropped my mug. Second: DO YOU ALWAYS WORK THIS LATE? Third: YOUR PLANT IS DYING. (It was. She was right. It died.)
I responded by holding up notebook pages. Mine said: THE SIGN THING. HOW LONG WERE YOU PLANNING THIS? Her answer, three nights of sign-work later: A YEAR. I counted. She’d been drafting.
The storm night — the palms, the lightning, the OPEN YOURS — was October. I want to describe her voice properly: it arrived through rain, hoarse from disuse, saying “I have tea!” like a woman leaping off a dock.
“I have no pants on!” I shouted back, because panic makes honest people of us.
“I’ll avert my eyes for exactly one flight of stairs!”
The stairs between our buildings wrapped around a shared landing. We met there — her with a thermos, me in the world’s longest sweater — and stood close enough to hear each other whisper while the rain did all the talking.
Her name was Sloane. She was a night-shift ER nurse, which explained the lamp schedule, the year of silence (days spent sleeping, nights spent saving people, socializing a luxury she’d rationed into one window), and the calm. God, the calm. She’d read my lamp like a vital sign.
We dated on that shared landing for two months — thermoses, folding chairs, a blanket she kept in a waterproof bin — because neither of us wanted to be the one to move the relationship indoors, as if the alley itself had officiated and we were respecting the venue.
Her lease ended in December. There was exactly one reasonable solution, which we arrived at the way we’d arrived at everything: a sign in her window, three nights in the making. YOUR SIDE HAS BETTER LIGHT.
The window is still there. Our lamp still sits in the corner. On our anniversary every year, we re-enact it: she goes across the alley (she kept the old apartment as her studio, the extravagance she defends as “sacred ground”), I stay in mine, and we do the palm-press through the rain-wet glass while our neighbors, who are now fully briefed and invested, watch from the landing with hot chocolate.
The string we measured the alley with — four feet, one inch — is framed between our windows.
Neither of us can remember who said “I love you” first. It doesn’t matter. It was probably written on a sign.
