Here is what my life looks like now, six weeks after the callback night that more or less broke me in the best possible way:

I wake up at eight. I make coffee — the good kind, not the strong-enough-to-dissolve-a-spoon kind that Lila keeps in her apartment out of what I've concluded is a genuine aesthetic commitment to the concept of suffering. I sit at my desk, which faces the windows, which face the building, which contains unit 25 on the twenty-fifth floor, which is where Lila Voss lives. At this hour she is almost certainly still asleep, because Lila's relationship with mornings is adversarial and she has made peace with that conflict by simply refusing to participate in mornings until around ten.

The monitors go on. I work. The city is its usual efficient chaos twenty-eight floors below.

At noon, approximately, my phone buzzes.

Alive, it says. This is Lila's morning greeting, which has never varied and which I've come to find as reliable and comforting as the actual good morning texts people send, probably more so because alive is both efficient and honest.

Verified, I text back, which is my response, which has also never varied.

This is our system. This is what we are.

We are not boyfriend and girlfriend. We agreed on this, or rather we arrived at it by mutual drift in the weeks after the confession — after the afternoon in her apartment and the official terms and the first performance night against the glass. The word dating got said once and then gently put down by both of us simultaneously, the way you put something fragile down when you're not sure the surface will hold it. What we are instead is: this. The texts. The nightly ritual. The windows. The Tuesday through Thursday shows, the Friday callbacks, the Saturday in-person dinners that don't have a name attached to them beyond dinner because we're not naming things and the not-naming is working.

It's working very well.

The nightly ritual works like this: we work our respective days, we eat separately or together depending on whether I've texted to come over or she's texted me. At some point after eleven — sometimes ten-thirty, sometimes closer to midnight — one of us signals. The signal system evolved from the lamp: she still uses it, I've adopted my own version which is simply turning off all my lights except the single desk lamp and rotating it to face the window, which she noticed and acknowledged with a thumbs up emoji sent at 11:47pm one Tuesday and which has been the system ever since.

What happens after the signal is — consistent, in the way that great things become consistent. We each settle into our respective spaces, our respective windows, and we watch each other, and we give each other something to watch, and the hundred feet of Manhattan air between us does its thing, which is conducting electricity. It conducts it extremely well.

I've added some infrastructure to the desk setup since September. A better desk lamp — adjustable color temperature, very important for the visual quality of what gets transmitted across one hundred feet of urban darkness. A chair that swivels more smoothly, since I've found the original gaming chair's rotation has gotten into the ritual and smooth rotation is better for — various reasons. I've also moved the second monitor off to the side so nothing blocks the direct sightline to unit 25, which was a decision I told myself was ergonomic and which was not even slightly ergonomic.

Lila has made her own improvements. I've catalogued these. New lamp — warmer bulb, positioned higher so the light hits her from above rather than from the side. The bed moved another six inches closer to the window, which means it's now essentially directly at the glass, which means that when she's on the bed I have an unobstructed view that is — good for the ritual. Also she's gotten a mirror. Floor-length, angled at the window, which creates a secondary reflection of herself visible to me from the building, which is — she is a person who takes her craft seriously. I find this deeply appealing.

Tonight the lamp goes up at eleven-fifteen.

I rotate my desk lamp to face the window at eleven-sixteen.

She's at the bed already, dressed in whatever she wears around the apartment, which varies by her mood and the temperature and whether she's in what she calls chaos mode versus productive mode. Tonight appears to be productive-mode adjacent, which typically means a loose shirt and sleep shorts and the specific energy of someone who has put in a real day and is now ready to decompress through one of her preferred methods.

She looks at the window. She can see me — the dark room, the lit lamp, the shape of me at the desk. I can see her.

She picks up her phone.

Hi, she texts.

Hi, I text back.

This is also part of the ritual now: we text through it. Not performative narration — just the back-channel conversation of two people who are doing a thing together and have phone access to each other.

She sets the phone down. She stands up and walks to the window and presses both palms against the glass, which is her signal for: I'm here, I'm starting, watch.

I watch.

I have been watching this woman through this window for months now and it has not gotten less interesting. I would like to report this as a data point to anyone who believes novelty is the only driver of desire. Novelty helps. But knowing — knowing the specific texture of what you're watching, knowing the person inside the image, the way her particular brand of ease reads as deeply personal rather than generically confident — that turns out to be the thing that outlasts novelty by a significant margin.

She steps back from the glass. The shirt comes off. The mirror catches her from the side and gives me the second angle and I am, as always, deeply grateful to her for the interior design decision.

My hand moves to my own setup, which is its own version of what she's doing, which involves me at the desk in the dark with the lamp angled toward the window and my particular attention entirely on unit 25 and my particular hands entirely occupied.

She finds her rhythm. I find mine.

The phone buzzes midway through.

Are you watching the mirror, she texts.

Yes, I text back.

Thought so, she texts.

She looks directly at my window, at the dark room with the single lamp, at me watching her watching the mirror, and she does something very specific that she knows I specifically like, and I make a sound in my apartment that is not documented here for professional reasons.

Afterward she lies at the foot of the bed, closest to the glass, and looks at the ceiling, and my phone buzzes.

Good?, she texts.

Extremely, I text.

Same, she texts.

Tomorrow night?, I ask.

It's Wednesday, she texts, which is not an answer and is completely an answer because Wednesday is for the ritual and Thursday is for the weekly performance show, which is a different and more elaborate thing, and she is already thinking about Thursday.

Right, I text.

Sleep, she texts.

Sleep, I agree.

This is what we are. Six weeks in and this is what we are, and it is, by any metric I know how to apply, excellent.