For the last seven years that I have lived in the same apartment, I always heard noises from outside my window. It sounded like muffled cries. Of pleasure? Of anger? Of simple communication? Birds, orgasms, neighbors, puppies?

Yet whenever I went to my window, I saw nothing. My building is awkward. My window faces opens to the a small unused space. To the right, the bathroom window. In the front facing me is the unwindowed wall of the kitchen. When I moved into the apartment, my roommate then made double my salary, and it seemed fair that I took the smaller room with a window that looked out to nothing.

When opportunities rose to move to the larger room with bay windows overlooking of Twin Peaks, I still did not move.

I felt satisfied to be in my room with awkward closets and the window with no view. But the sounds that echoed up to my desk, which I had always faced the window…it puzzled me for no end. Why would my neighbors have sex in the middle of the day? And I could never find the source of the sounds, peering as much as I could into the space.

But then today, as I sat at my desk, another day to feverishly write and letting words pour out of my fingertips, I finally saw the source. A pigeon. A fat one reminding me of the childhood cartoon from the early nineties. I finally saw the flap of its wings, the flutter of the feathers and the coo that echoes in this empty unused space.

As I was struggling to come up with a compelling arc for a short story, it gave me a look. A look that said, “You silly girl, all you have to do is sit at your desk every day and work hard. If you had sat here every day, you would have noticed me all along.”