There is a woman who lives in the apartment below you.

Sometimes you can hear music from her radio or the muted voices of her guests.

To you, she seems like she must have dark eyes.
She seems like she must be about forty years old.
You know that she lives alone.
You hear her footsteps at seven-thirty every week day and you see her walk to a blue sedan a few moments later.
You live on the 18th floor and she looks very small from this height and you can't hear the sound of her footsteps or the slam of her car door.

There are seven inches of flooring between you and her, but you fear you will never meet her. Her first initial is on the mailbox downstairs, but you are afraid to go down a flight to try to run into her in the hall and ask her what it stands for. You don't know what to say. You know too much about her life, about her conversations, about which TV shows she likes. You don't know how to make it seem like a first encounter because, to you, she is an intimate friend.

It is almost enough to be like this.

You have no friends or family who come by, but she is there, you hear her footsteps at the same time every day and it is reassuring to you.

You trust her.

The one thing that you cannot get past, however, is that you cannot see her face. You fantasize about going to her apartment and knocking on the door, but then she would see your face, and you would have to begin the endless series of speculations about how she felt about seeing it. What you need is a way to see her without her seeing you. You dream of hiding out in her apartment, of following her to work, but there is so much risk. You are not a criminal. There must be no chance of detection.

One day you are reaching out the window to the ledge to retrieve some pots of herbs you had growing out there. They are long dead from the winter chill and you had quite forgotten them.

As you crawl partially out the window to reach the last one, a gleam of light shines in your eye and you realize that the light is from her apartment. You peer as far over the edge as you, can but you can only see through her window at an oblique angle. You return to your living room, overpowered with your desire to see her.

For the next few days you pace your living room floor, entertaining notions of various contraptions that would allow you to see her, but they are all too complex. You spend hours staring out your window dreaming of a time when you could validate the slightest sound from below by looking in on her to see what she is doing.

A few nights later in a dream you see your body on the ground below. With it is your cane, some spare change, and the cane's rubber stopper.

In the paper, it is listed as a somewhat bizarre, tragic gardening accident. You were reaching out to place new pots of herbs and you fell from your window. No one can explain why the cane is there with you. In this dream, you are there with the police, trying to explain how you held the cane from its end with the crook circled around the drain pipe, how you leaned out over the ledge using the cane as support, how you stared into her apartment content to watch her wash the dishes. She looked up at you and moved towards the window. In a panic, you tried to stand on the ledge, but your hand slid up the cane. The rubber stopper held your hand in place for an instant, but then it slipped off and you fell.

These obsessions, you are tellingthe policeman, are so silly and have cost you so much, such a strange idea, all to see a woman you barely know at all. As the policeman zips up the body, you awaken.

For a few hours you chuckle about the dream, wondering if you have gone crazy. From the apartment below you hear the sound of an alarm clock. As you get up from breakfast, you begin to look around for your cane.