The Neighbor's Light Is on Again and So Is My Imagination

There is a window across the courtyard, third floor, slightly left of my kitchen, and its light is on again at 2 A.M. I want it noted for the record that I do not spy. I merely stand at my sink, glass of water in hand, in a state of heightened architectural awareness. If a window happens to be in the way of my gaze, that is the building's fault, not mine.

From here I can see a bookshelf, a lamp with a yellow shade, and on rare occasions, the back of a man's head as he pads past in a gray sweater. That is the full extent of my intelligence. And yet by the time my water is gone, I have given him a profession (translator, naturally), a cat named Ferdinand, and a complicated history with a woman in Lisbon.

Is this healthy? Probably not. Is it delightful? Wildly. There is a particular joy in inventing an entire person from a lamp and a sweater, a joy that has nothing to do with whether the person exists in that shape. I am not in love with the neighbor. I am in love with the story I get to write about him, which is a much safer and more flattering arrangement.

Last week he stopped, turned, and looked toward the courtyard. I froze with the faucet running like a burglar in a cartoon. He lifted a mug, almost a toast, though surely at nothing at all, and moved on. I have replayed that mug-lift roughly forty times. In my version it is witty and slightly dangerous. In his, it was probably tea.

That is the whole secret of a good midnight imagination: it makes a stranger's tea feel like an overture. I take my invented neighbors very seriously and very lightly at once. If you enjoy that kind of story, spun from glances and almosts, there is a whole shelf of romance dramas on TheFriend, including Her Favorite Game Is Him. All fictional, all with excellent lighting.

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