Loveless played on the stereo, and over time, the entire summer became one big sound immersion. Neither of us could think straight, through the lovely, fuzzy synthesizers, through the heat, through the cloud of insects and the bees that had accumulated inside, through our skin to each other, or through the specter of the rest of our lives. We were woozy with boredom, with itchiness, with slight blood loss, with the end of a relationship. We took late morning naps, or we took it out on each other.

The summer took place on the second floor of an apartment building in Hyde Park, and the window soon became a focus of solitary activity. We took turns sitting on the sill, openly dangling our legs. Below was a narrow concrete alleyway that other residents took when they dumped out the trash.

When my ex sat on the windowsill, he wrote poems and manifestos, always manifestos, tired, gruesome, lonely and hungry manifestoes that dissolved in soggy piles on the hardwood floor when the rain billowed in. With his Slavic nose, he had a million dollar profile and looked good perched on that sill. I thought small, clever things like that were enough to base an entire summer on, were enough to warrant all the time that was being spent in that room.

When I sat on the sill, I didn't do much of anything. Except that I liked the feeling of vertigo, and I liked the wait for it to creep up on me. I would look at the neighbor's cast iron fence, painted a greasy black. Unlike the richer homes a few blocks north in Kenwood, the bars were not topped with pleasant, bourgeois metal topiaries, but steely spikes that thrust upward, feudal and territorial.

If ever one of us slipped from the sill, we'd be easily dispatched in the middle of our last breaths by these spikes. I imagined them slicing my skin, slipping through two ribs to puncture my lonely, insecure heart. When I finally did experience vertigo, it was at the most unexpected moment, with the sun pounding down, dizzying and awful. I felt slightly more alive, hands clenched in a cold sweat, pulse quickening.

If I had to say why I kept the window open that summer, it's this: During that vertigo wait, I'd peer beyond those bars into our neighbor's backyard. It was filled with dogs and kids on Sundays, when they would eat dry rub barbecue in the afternoons. Their voices were loud and crisp when they fought or conversed or reconciled on giant, generous terms.

And I have no idea what my ex would think about as he'd sit on the sill, what he chose to see. Whether like me, he leaned forward toward the scene just beyond his reach, the light and the trees, the smell of meat and the setting sun, the assembly of domestic order. Whether he'd strained so hard toward it that he'd nearly fall off, saved by his own shocked, brusque reflex, or the hand of the other, pulling me back inside.

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