Recently, we watched the neighbours move out. It seemed to happen quickly in the end. A life packed into boxes on the kitchen counter, the curtains taken down. Within hours, the room had emptied. A lone Henry Hoover sat in the corner.

That evening we ate dinner at the table where, from one side, we could see into our neighbours’ home. I felt the unexpected press of darkness, now that their lights were off. We admitted that we missed them, and it felt weird to miss them, these strangers whose lives we had seen unfold by accident.

It had all started two years earlier, in the middle of that strange first Covid summer. M and I moved to the flat we live in now, leaving the woodland estate we spent the first lockdown for somewhere where sirens pierce the sky. Our kitchen backed onto another couple’s life.  

Then, the woman was heavily pregnant. But we soon saw the couple tentatively push the buggy out the back gate with a tiny bundle tucked inside. We have seen grandparents and friends visit, and the baby start to walk and have parties thrown in her honour and grow a ponytail. On hot summer nights, when the sound systems that have been in this area far longer than we have fire up, we have seen them dance in the kitchen, just as we have danced in ours.

They saw us too. They saw us move in, they saw us rip out the kitchen and put in another. They will have seen us having blazing rows and trying to shuck oysters and throwing parties. They will have seen some of the less-interesting things in-between.

When autumn closed in with it the Rule-of-Six and winter clamped down with a cancelled Christmas, we watched them sweep leaves away in the back garden and hang up decorations. M and I spoke about putting up signs, saying ‘Hello!’ or ‘Happy New Year!’ We thought about inviting them over or popping round to say hello. In the end, the most we did was catch eyes, smile and wave shyly while she was changing the baby.

In other flats, in other parts of London, I have met the neighbours. The people you borrow loo plungers from or apologise for making noise to, whose dogs you pat and Christmas cards you open, addressed anonymously “to all who live at Number 12”. But we never met the family over the way. I don’t think I’d recognise them if we passed them in the street.

A few years ago a film called The Neighbor’s Window won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. Over the course of 20 minutes it shows the parents of a young and growing family become wound into the lives of the people in the flat opposite, like fish on a line. They are also a couple, but they are younger and better-looking. They have vigorous sex and entertain their glamorous friends without drawing the curtains. The parents dig out a pair of binoculars, bought to take to the Catskills but increasingly kept on the kitchen table and used to watch the neighbours. When they are surrounded by spilled Cheerios, night feeds and sleepless squabbling, they look out to the window opposite and see another life: not just something theirs isn’t, but something theirs maybe was, once, or could have been had they made different choices.

The film was based on a Love and Radio podcast episode released in 2015, but the timing of that Oscar win made The Neighbor’s Window all the more piquant: within a matter of weeks, the world would be locked down due to the Covid pandemic. Suddenly, our social calendars shrunk and our neighbours took on a new presence and resonance in our lives. We became newly reliant on the neighbourhoood WhatsApp groups and the happenstance interactions that collided with our daily exercise. We didn’t see our friends for months, but we would see our neighbours – relative strangers, many of them – daily.

Would we have felt so close to the family over the way had lockdown not happened? I think so; The Neighbor’s Window suggests so. I do not cry easily, but I did in the final scenes of that film, when the camera is finally turned back to the parents’ apartment and we see what the couple have seen. In the silence that falls between glass and street furniture and walls we can tell our own stories. People’s lives become flattened to scenes in neat boxes. The small difficulties of life are ironed out, and we see what we want to. We feel close to these people because part of us wonders what it is to be them. We feel close to these lives because they expose what we have, or don’t have, instead.  

A new neighbour moved in the afternoon after the family moved out. We saw the lights on, new boxes on the kitchen table. We said we would wait, but that this time we should say hello. Two mornings later I heard M’s muffled shouting. “I lifted up the window and introduced myself,” he said.