I stand in my tub staring at the building across the street. The narrow bathroom window is catty corner to the floor-to-ceiling windows in a stranger’s bedroom, and I am unashamedly rear windowing. But my neighbor, she is doing something unthinkable in a pandemic panicked world. For the past five minutes she has been standing in the embrace of her lover who I know doesn’t live in that apartment with her. Macramé tacked to the walls, potted pothos lining the floor of her bedroom with its pink flowered bedspread, closet doors closed for company when they’re usually bursting open with clothes. Neither of them move, his khaki-sleeved arms loose around her waist, her red hair cascading down her back, and I am on high alert, fingers turning white as I grip the window’s ledge. My voice arches into panic as I call for my partner.

The narrow building across the street juts skyward, the kind of whitewashed neu architecture that says gentrification. Almost a decade before it was a square of dirt, underdeveloped land between pre-war apartments and a pawn shop. Now our view of the bell tower on the church a few streets over has morphed into this long embrace where Covid particles race between the un-distanced.

This prolonged hug seems like the end of a world. Maybe it’s a relationship brought to the brink by too much closeness—he moved in and it became a co-quarantine gone wrong. Or he could have stopped by to say hi against Doctor Fauci’s recommendations, brought her an orchid he stood in line for hours to procure from Trader Joe’s. And now he gets human contact. Such a base way to show affection: entrapping another in your arms, pulling something closer to belonging. But his arms are sagging, like my own when someone holds me tight for too long. I feel my blood pulsing sympathetically, the desire to step back without offending caught in the crosshairs of someone else’s need.

My partner steps into the tub and I turn sideways to make more room, brazenly pointing at the woman and the man locked in an unending embrace. They’ve been like that for five minutes.

Who?

That woman and that guy.

What woman?

Her! I push my pointer finger into the pane, outline her frozen figure where she stands close to the bedroom doorway. A few months ago this finger would have been sailing down a cocktail menu on an after work drink date, scrolling through the invite for a reading, struggling to fish my gym fob out of my coat—all inaccessible lives on a Wednesday evening in April of 2020. How many times did I drag my tired body to places that I can no longer travel to safely? Now, when I feel so rested, I ache for something fresh, a situation that smacks of potential unrest.

In the tub, I stand inches from the man I love and he smiles at me with my Crest white strips on my teeth and three-day-old hair, yet I’m still unable to release the idea that outside of my apartment is better.

My partner has been making salsa. I watched him dice the tomatoes painstakingly, each cut exact and unforgiving, wanting to give me perfection. He has made me loose leaf tea, has carried the kittens to me when they are particularly cuddly, has rubbed my back when I cry out in nightmares. And yet I call him away from everything inside to point to strangers across the street, to ask him to bear witness to this other intimacy.

Do you mean the coat hanging on the wall? he asks. He places his hands on my shoulders, moves me to stand in front of him. Together we trace the girl who doesn’t belong here through his eyes, but this time I see her hair is a cherry-red scarf cascading the way hair might, her lover’s arms just empty sleeves of a puffy jacket.

I laugh because of how long I’ve been standing in a dry tub, missing the life of strangers. This need to gather the outside world in, to populate myself with other people, is still a part of life in isolation. My partner lets me go on laughing as we stand together, the sound collecting in the basin. He joins and our animals watch us howl at one another from the bathroom doorway, all of us certain we are more alive than we’ve ever been within these six hundred square feet.