Boris & Sam: A Short Love Story

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His apartment was nothing to call home about. In fact, he actively avoided calling home about it for fear that his mother would lecture him about all the reasons he should have never moved so far away in the first place. Besides his iPhone, his coffee table was the most expensive thing he owned, and even that he got for pennies on the dollar due to some unfounded luck on Craigslist.

Atop it sat a small plate he used in his attempts to burn incense, but for whatever reason, he could never actually keep it burning. Next to it was a stack of books he’d been meaning to read that he’d picked up from a discount bookstore in the neighborhood. He always gravitated toward the classics despite considering himself the opposite of “well-read,” but he considered his intent to read them almost as impressive as actually reading them.

In order to afford his studio—or, at the very least, afford paying first and last month’s rent—he sold his bike. A Bianchi his parents had given him when he had originally moved to the city. And while his complete and utter lack of possessions should have stressed him out, it didn’t. It was the first time in his adult life that everything surrounding him was definitively his. His coffee table, his knife block, his wicker basket holding extra bedding in case someone wanted to sleep over after having too much to drink.

His only issue on this particular night wasn’t that he still didn’t have cable or that he had slightly overcooked his salmon, but that the only window facing the building’s courtyard was stuck. While it may have been a blessing for it to be seemingly glued shut on any other cold fall night, they were at the very end of a three-day Indian summer that he knew he’d be craving come January. He had tried everything—taking pliers to the latch, banging on the handle with a rubber hammer, etc. The only thing he hadn’t done was report to his landlord who wasn’t going to fix it anyway.

For all intents and purposes, this window was his lifeline. His outlet to the world, his entertainment, his literal and figurative breath of fresh air. While he could often smell smoke from his neighbors in the hallway, he didn’t want to be that neighbor which is why he always blew it out the window instead. Sure, he ran the risk of someone in the other buildings in plain view of his window reporting him, but again, his landlord wouldn’t do anything about it—mostly because there was no way they’d be able to get a hold of him.

One of his fears was that the smoke would stick to his dog, Sam. He and Sam both knew it was a nasty habit, and it wasn’t fair for him to subject his dog to the second-hand smoke DARE had warned about all through middle school. And really, there seemed to me something romantic about gazing out a window rather than gazing directly into the black mirrors that surround him. He didn’t consider himself to be all that introspective or anything, but there was a calmness he felt as he sat motionless in his apartment while the rest of the city hustled and bustled around him.

Since moving in mid-summer, he and Sam had established somewhat of a routine — walk around the block around 6 p.m. when he’d get home from work, make dinner around 7:15, and play a quick game of fetch in the courtyard before they’d finally settle in on the couch together to watch something on the Amazon Fire Stick he’d stolen from his parents’ den. It wasn’t much of a nightly tradition, but it was their nightly tradition.

It wasn’t until earlier that September that a wrench was thrown into things. While checking the mail, he noticed his neighbor’s last name–Anderson—had been covered up by a new name: Wallace. He hadn’t exactly gotten to know his neighbors all that well, so this wasn’t some earth-shattering or life-altering change. But just minutes after noticing this, he noticed something more—a young woman sitting on the bench in the courtyard feeding her Scottie.

This didn’t affect him much outside of maybe wondering what the new dog’s bark sounded like and whether or not it would keep him up at night or wake him up early in the morning. Well, that, and the fact that she was noticeably good looking. Better looking than most of his other neighbors who, in addition to being old, smelled like scallion cream cheese.

Over the first week of her tenure as his neighbor, he couldn’t help but let her routine affect his routine. Looking out the window before he and Sam’s normal post-work walk, he’d see her sitting on the courtyard bench night after night after night. Her routine was seemingly more intense and rigorous than his, which spoke volumes because he was too poor to even think about switching his routine up in the first place.

It didn’t take long before they spoke in a silent love language — exchanges of waves back and forth, nods from across the courtyard, or in the worst of cases, that awkward eye contact you have with someone where both parties immediately turn their heads away as if they were fixated on something else.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t just her presence or looks that through him off, but her relationship with the neighbors he’d done a good job of avoiding. She never seemed to be alone on the bench, but always with a tenant who seemed absolutely enamored by her. Old men smiling ear-to-ear, and even older women looking at her like they’d look at their granddaughters. He never would have described her as “infectious” to anyone, but from the looks of it, the rest of the building would beg to differ.

Through their first couple weeks living within shouting distance of one another, their interactions were unfortunately limited. A nod in the hallway, an exchange of pleasantries in the courtyard, and an awkward run-in when she nearly dropped her Whole Foods bag walking up the front steps. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint why, but there was a part of him—a large part of him—that was completely, unabashedly, head-over-heels, get-down-on-one-knee-atop-the-Empire-State-Building in love with her.

She had a very defined aesthetic. Her under-waxed Barbour coat. Her New York Times tote bag. Her tortoise glasses. Her suspiciously white teeth. Every single part of him felt compelled to flip the script of Romeo & Juilet and profess his love for her from his window rather than the other way around.

But instead, he didn’t. He couldn’t. After all, how could he? They barely knew each other. Hell, they hadn’t yet had a conversation around each other without some geriatric fly on the wall listening in while Sam and her Scottie, Boris, sniffed each other in the ferns. But even if he did get that moment alone with her, how would he handle it? Would he have the perfect responses for everything she had to say? Would they even hold a conversation? Would he realize after five minutes of her droning on about her boring job that he wasn’t, in fact, in love with her? Was that a risk he was willing to take?

But that night—the night his window wouldn’t seem to open—he spotted her sitting on that very bench. Alone for once. Not staring into her phone, not talking endlessly to an elderly shared neighbor of their’s, and seemingly not in any rush to leave.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he wasn’t impressed with what he saw. Khakis with paint stains down the front paired with a ratty white t-shirt, and scruff on his face that somewhat brought out his emerging double-chin. His concerns, though, were that if he were to change, he’d end up looking to prim and proper. Like he was getting ready for a date. Like he had better things to do than sit on a bench and lose track of time with her.

He considered tapping on the window to let her know he’d be right out, but his first taps proved to be fruitless endeavors.

“Sam,” he said while peering out the window, “let’s go outside.”

That night as the sun went down, 76 degrees felt like 96 degrees. Whether it was the Indian summer’s humidity, his terribly lazy choice of clothes, or simply his nerves putting him on edge, he felt suffocated by the heavy air in the hallway that lead to the steps down to the back. Emerging from the door, she still sat idly while Sam sprinted to Boris to get their nightly smelling out of the way.

“Funny seeing you here!” he lead with.

“Shit,” he thought to himself. “Funny seeing you here? Who says that in this day and age? That’s what a nearly-retired dentist says when he walks up to a patient’s chair and sees a regular customer from the past 40 years.”

But she smiled. She smiled in a way unlike she had smiled since maybe the Whole Foods bag incident of last week.

“Hey! How are you?” she asked.

The conversation was going nothing like he’d hoped for at this juncture, all of three sentences in. If she was truly the love of his life, courting her through pleasantries and generic banter was never going to work. For some reason, though, she didn’t seem to mind. She sat next to him gazing forward at the dogs as they kept sniffing, all with a somewhat content look on her face.

She was wearing a pair of overalls with a striped sailor’s shirt underneath and a handkerchief tied around her neck. Peering down, he wondered what was in that New York Times tote bag she always had with her. It was probably a makeshift purse, or perhaps filled with tools for the rooftop community garden.

He couldn’t sense any awkwardness coming from her end, but he felt like he was a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire—the world staring at him while his brain overthought every decision he was about to make. Unfortunately, there were no lifelines to help him out.

The fifteen second silence felt like that of decades. Was the silence as deafening to her as it was to him? Was she even thinking about him, or was she in a daze thinking about someone or something else? After all, how could you sit this close to someone and not wonder what’s going through their head? You wouldn’t just plop down on an empty bench in a spacious park and not converse with the person just an arm’s reach away.

“So I see you around here all the time,” he finally broke. “But I never got your name.”

“Elizabeth,” she told him while extending her hand to shake his, looking at him with eyes that commanded he reciprocate the introduction.

“T-T-Tom,” he spat out. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

But then the conversation fell flat again—partially because they simply had nothing to talk about, but more so because Boris and Sam found themselves at opposite sides of the courtyard sniffing god-knows-what.

Tom felt like he felt at a middle school dance leading up to the final moment of the night that could make or break you—when your hand was forced and you finally had to ask your crush for that final dance, probably to “Stairway to Heaven.” The fear of denial, while crippling, was also motivating. But if you didn’t ask in time, you ran the risk of dancing with someone you despised for eight minutes.

“You know,” she told him, “If it wasn’t for that time you helped me with my groceries, I would’ve thought I was the youngest person in the building by about 30 years.”

He laughed. “I know,” he responded, “Something tells me we won’t be getting any volleyball games going back here with the other residents.”

Then, she laughed. “Gerald told me you were pretty nice,” she complimented him. “Said you helped him out with fixing his sink because there’s no way he’d be able to get up if he got on his back on his kitchen floor.”

Tom remembered back to one of the first days he lived there. Sure enough, she was right.

“Ha, yes,” he laughed, “Gerry’s a good guy. He smells a bit like egg salad, but a good guy nonetheless.”

She looked off toward the dogs again while muttering, “Yep, he’s one of my best customers.”

Perplexed, Tom did just about everything but actually scratch his head in confusion. “Customers?” he wondered before finally actually asking that exact same yet simple question out loud.

“Yeah,” she told him, “Isn’t that why you’re down here?”

His confusion only snowballed. “I… I don’t follow,” he told her.

Leaning over, she grabbed that same tote that had become so characteristic of her in his mind. But rather than reaching in, she simply put it between them and opened it just enough so he could see what was inside.

“It’s $45 for an eighth,” Elizabeth told him, “but for new customers, I think I can swing about $40.”

He peered down and saw perfectly individually packaged bags of weed like something out of a Wes Anderson movie; the smell of which knocked him back a bit.

Unsure of how to react, one thought kept running through his head: “Maybe that’s why the community garden’s so hard to get a plot in.”