Watching the Lighted Windows Opposite My Bed

Dear Delyara, I spent an hour tonight sitting on the edge of my bed with the lights off, looking through the blinds at the apartment block opposite. I can see a dozen small, illuminated squares of life—a woman cooking over a bright stove, a man folding laundry, the blue flicker of a television screen against a white wall. Every single one of those windows holds a world of shared speech and routine human contact. And here I am, sitting in the dark, watching them like an anthropologist looking at a distant tribe. The sheer density of this city makes the isolation feel like a cruel joke; you are separated by twelve inches of concrete, yet completely unreachable.