The thing about living on the twenty-eighth floor is that you stop feeling like a voyeur after about two weeks.

After two weeks, it's just your view.

I'm Julian Navarro, game developer, occasional insomniac, and apparently, according to the notebook I keep under my bed like a genuine weirdo, the unofficial archivist of everyone's nighttime habits in the building across the street. To be fair, I started keeping notes because I was designing a city-builder game and needed authentic behavioral data. That's what I told myself. The notes now include things like "Couple in 2203 screaming about a cheese grater again" and "Yoga woman in 2715 has learned the crow pose — genuinely proud of her," so perhaps the city-builder explanation has run its course.

I don't look into windows on purpose. I sit at my desk, which faces the windows, which face the building, and I work. The city is just there. Bright and constant and alive at two in the morning in a way that makes me feel less alone without requiring me to actually interact with anyone, which is the ideal social arrangement.

My desk chair is a battered, expensive thing — a gaming chair I justified as a business expense — and I rotate it forty-five degrees when I'm not actively on screen, which is when I do my best thinking. Or my best not-thinking. Or my best cataloguing of the human aquarium across the street.

Tonight: the fighting couple in 2203 are not fighting. They're cuddled on the couch watching something that makes them both laugh at the same time, which is the most intimate thing I've seen in months and I'm choosing not to examine what that says about my social life. Yoga woman in 2715 is doing something that is technically yoga but looks more like a spiritual crisis expressed in downward dog. The two guys on 24 are gaming — I can tell from the controller shapes and the synchronized fist-pumping.

The apartment on 25 has been empty for three weeks. New building, good bones, but that particular unit had a water damage issue that the management company handled with the urgency of a government agency processing a rebate. I know because I looked it up. I told myself this was for noise-tracking purposes.

The apartment on 25 has light in it tonight.

Someone moved in.

I lean forward, not because I'm looking — I am not looking, I'm just orienting — and I see the glow of a floor lamp being placed, repositioned, placed again. The silhouette of someone moving around a space and figuring out where the furniture goes, which is a very specific kind of movement that I recognize from when I moved in here. The slightly frantic, slightly excited energy of a new space not yet organized into a life.

The silhouette is, demonstrably, a woman.

I lean back. I open my game engine. I write a function and delete it and write it again. The city is bright. The building across the street has a new occupant on 25.

I tell myself this is ambient information. Background data. The human aquarium has a new fish.

I go back to work.

At two-seventeen in the morning, the light on 25 is still on.

At two-nineteen, I glance over again, which I was not going to do.

The lamp has been moved to a different wall. The silhouette is holding something up — a piece of art, maybe, checking how it looks against the brick. She puts it down. Picks it up. Puts it in a completely different spot.

I find myself smiling at this, which is probably fine.

I go to bed at two-forty-five. I sleep adequately. In the morning, I note in my notebook: New occupant, unit 25. Woman. Rearranged furniture for approximately two hours. Indecisive or creative — will update.