Work Text:
Into The Window of Greener Grass
An Essay By Finnick Odair
My year can be summarized in one square. One flat, clear expanse of glass that kept me busy for over 365 days. I moved my entire living room around to position myself in eyesight of that window. So at any given moment of the day I could glance over and look out. After all it was becoming strange that I would stop in the middle of the room and watch my young neighbors have sex across the street. Annie didn’t particularly like that.
Let me back up a bit. I stared out my window into another window, a window that used to be covered by a curtain, plain-Jane white and boring. Then this couple moved in, young and beautiful, and it was like a television had been turned on for the first time in years. And I, one who’s never particularly been fond of TV, could not stop watching. Did I mention Annie hated it?
Annie is my wife. Annie was my wife; we divorced officially two months ago. She likes to blame the demise of our marriage on the window, but honestly we were doomed before we started. Two souls mangled by the horrors of war, trying to hold on to a love built on the promise of happy ever after. A promise that I lost faith in the first time I saw a dead body.
I, and my wife, my ex wife, are war journalists. Were war journalists. We were a team; I captured the moment on the page and Annie behind the lens. We were going to be Pulitzer winners, we were going to be heroes in the journalism world and tell all the stories everyone was too afraid to say. To some we were heroes, we were fearless in the eyes of the gutless, we were the ones who returned with the evidence of war; on thumb drives and hard drives ready for print, and on our bodies and in our minds ready to relive the madness at any given moment.
My left arm is covered in scars, my memento of a shrapnel bomb going off feet away while I was recording audio to be translated. I was lucky, three of the five others ended with much worse wounds than a semi crushed hand, and the other two are dead. Annie’s battle wounds weren’t as visible as mine but still there all the same, and still just as damning.
Nowadays, I’m found mostly in the society pages. New Yorks real life gossip girl (boy) if you will. I traded the fields of wars to trade secrets of the elite, and Annie works as a lecturer at NYU. We were happy, we were fine.
Enough of that—Annie didn’t like our new neighbors. “You don’t even know them,” I would say as I stared across the distance. I would watch as the stocky man, blonde and pale would spin the girl in circles, dancing around to music only heard by them. His black haired counterpart, slender and tan would laugh, smile wide, as she twirled. Her smile set the room ablaze. “It’s just so wrong, put some clothes on” Annie would say. I told her we used to be so carefree before…
Annie started closing our curtains.
For weeks we trudged around our apartment now dim and dull, the only light coming from the smile of our three-year-old son Miles. It was odd to have the curtains drawn. We’d never really done that before, it felt like part of our home had just disappeared with the view. I told Annie this the day I reopened up the curtains. I did not tell her I needed to know what the young couple was doing. I did not tell her how I missed them, how much I missed the heat of the sun in my face. Did I say how much they reminded me of my youth?
To be fair, they didn’t seem to be much younger than me, maybe mid twenties. And I, slowly (god please slowly) approaching 33, still can turn a few heads if I say so myself. And I can say so; I’m a single man now. It’s still weird.
This couple had sex all the time. I’d love to say I’m exaggerating, but it seemed as though every time I looked over there they were. Sometimes I’d see more of her, sometimes him. At times they’d disappear from view all together and then emerge in a heap of limps or tangle of bed sheets to move to another part of the apartment.
“Who even moves their bed to the living room” Annie complained. I did. When I first moved into this apartment, I’d had a roommate at the time, and my bedroom was the living room. I pushed my bed against the window, just like they did, so I could wake up with the city. I didn’t tell Annie this. She’d long since grown tired of me defending the young, attractive naked woman across the street. “I’m actually defending both of them” I had once said. I slept out on the couch that night.
I could see Annie’s frustration, I really could. We, the new parents of a toddler with little to no alone time, were having this constant reminder of what we’re missing out on thrown right in our face. I can see where she thought I might be drifting, wishing to be apart of something else, new and exciting, to be in the shoes of the blond man. She was only half wrong.
I had no interest in being the blond man. He seemed to be doing just fine without trading spots with me. But to be apart of this new exciting world where love like theirs existed in a place outside of a memory was appealing. Appealing to the point of obsession.
I watched them constantly over months. I learned their habits. I could tell when they were particularly giddy, and I knew when they were off. I slowly became the invisible third wheel of this lovey-dovey couple. And I was fine with that.
For a while, it eased up, my voyeurism, for lack of a better word. “That’s exactly what it is” Annie would say if she were here. Fine. Call it what you will, but my attachment to these two started to dwindle. Miles was becoming more active, and as the parent who worked from home, required most of my attention. I didn’t mind. The couple would be there whenever I had time to check in.
Until one day they weren’t.
I noticed earlier in the day that they were gone, the view of their bedroom oddly tidy in contrast to its normal disarray. The first day I didn’t think anything of it.
The next day passed. No sign of them.
A week passed, and then two. Had they moved?
I remembered having the oddest sensation of abandonment in that moment, thinking that these people who I had grown so attached to have left me behind.
A panic that eventually seeped into mild depression took over my life in the weeks of their absence. I start to ingratiate myself back into my life, into my marriage. I wake, I eat , I parent, I eat, I husband, I sleep. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Then I see movement, out of the corner of my eye. I see her, struggling with the window. After a few hard tugs she finally opens the window and leans into the open air. I can tell her eyes are closed. I can see the movement of her breathing. Chest rising and falling. Up and down. In and out.
“Finnick did you find it?” Annie, had sent me in the room to find something for Miles. I don’t remember what I said, but she soon joined me at the window and watched with me as the woman lit a cigarette. “It was nice having you back to myself.”
I don’t think I was meant to hear that.
In the following days there was a flurry of activity. People were coming in and out of view dropping off things or rearranging items. But every day at sunset, she would be there at the window, cigarette lit.
The day the man came back was the day we were set to visit my Aunt Mags upstate for a week and a half. I remember lingering in the window every time I passed with a piece of luggage, or finding a reason to tidy up a space in sight.
My blond vision, once strong and boisterous, looked slim and gaunt, and very, seriously sick. I remembering saying as much to my wife.
“We need to finish packing up the rental,” was her response.
My mind was on my window for 10 days. I was so terrified that he wouldn’t be there when we returned. I didn’t know what was wrong, but from the few glimpses I’d gotten, it wasn’t good.
We returned to a street littered with cars. I dropped Annie off in front of our building so she wouldn’t have to walk far with the baby and a couple of bags. I was anxious on my walk back to the apartment, nervous of what I’d find.
Outside of my building, I paused and looked up and across the street, craning my neck to get a view of the window.
The mysterious pop-up of all of the cars was explained once I got up stairs. I could see people in the window. More people than had ever been there before. There was a short and pudgy woman, tucking in the sheets at the corners. A nervous habit I guessed, as she did it three times in succession. Two taller, stockier versions of what the man used to be, which I assumed were his brother, paced in and out of the room, at times coming by the bed and staying for a while, and other just glancing from the doorway.
Other people came and went. A tall, blond man that came immediately to her side as he walked in, maybe a relative of hers. A haggard looking man, and a woman with vibrant, multi-colored hair came.
Days passed and people came and went. Came and went. Came and went. Until it was just her and him.
I sat there for hours watching her as she watched him. I could only see the back of his head propped up against the edge of the headboard, but I saw her. Her forced smiles as she laughed. I could see every effort she put into entertaining him, occupying his mind on whatever else she could, I assume. I could she the embers of their romance in her eyes, once fiery sparks, start to slowly burn out as the days went on.
A few times as the sun began to set she’d help him turn over and they’d watch together from the window until he would slump into her and she’d help him back into bed. She would sit and stroke his face for hours.
It became startlingly clear to me that the romantic fairytale had turned into hospice care.
I kept asking myself how? He is so young. Why?
I lost track of the days I watched them after that. I didn’t want to measure my time with them. I was afraid I’d start to look at it as a countdown, ticking away the seconds I had left with them. Instead I sat and watched her as she watched him, and I found peace in their love.
The street was a bit crowded one day on my way back from the market a few blocks down. I could barely follow the ramblings of my four-year-old as I raced to the apartment to look.
There was a group gathered again. Smaller than before but larger than the three of us.
The three of us.
My gut twisted in sync with my heart as I took in the view around the bed. They were all knelt around him, hands outreached, touching some part of him.
I couldn’t see her at first in midst of the group, but just like before, they started to leave one by one until it was just her and him. And me.
The day he died, was coincidentally the day Annie gave me divorce papers. So emotionally raw from the past few weeks, it set me off into an angry tirade. A shouting match erupted which ended with her storming off to comfort our crying child. By the time I looked back to the window. The window was empty.
After a frantic few seconds, I spotted the van below with a black slender bag being rolled into the cabin of the van.
My son’s cries became muted by the rush of blood to my ears; the beat of my heart racing to reach its end.
I watched as the coroner drove away, and as I looked back for her, on the stoop I saw her. She was looking up. Watching me watch her.
This was four months ago. If all goes as planned, four months to date, and I still watch the window.
I watch as she recovers, I watch as she evolves, I watch as her routine changes. I watch as she changes, and I mean that figuratively.
I watch as the sunset paints her in hues of red and orange. And in those moments I see the fire in her eyes that I saw when she looked at him.
My next door neighbor Johanna, who I’ve shared this story with, asked me what I would do if I ever saw her on the street. “Would you [even] say hi to her at the [farmers?] market?” edited for the purity of this publication.
No. I wouldn’t say hi. How weird would that be? I don’t know her name. I didn’t even know his name. She doesn’t know that I exist. But I wish I could let her know that someone out there is rooting for her—that girl on fire.