Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls

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Somewhere in our early teen years it’s inevitable that our parents become sources of great embarrassment to us, held accountable for everything they are and aren’t, could’ve been or should never be.

Before things can get to that stage, though, it sometimes goes the other direction. We realize, even if we can’t articulate it with the same sharpness with which we sense it, that once the bloom is off the earliest years of childhood, we stand revealed as something our parents are mortified to have created.

I always knew a lot more about the latter than the former.

It was spring when she moved into the house next door. It must have been spring, because my window was open, and, directly across from it, so was hers, and had been for at least a day, as though the neighbors were expecting her and had to flush the stale winter air out of the room or maybe the entire uppermost floor.

Everything there was to know about life on the third floor, I understood it inside and out by this point, and had for more than two years.

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