This is an Oscar-winning short film that stood out to me the most when I saw it in a short film festival with a friend a couple years ago. (The following contains spoilers).
Lovely and wholesome, “The Neighbor’s Window” shows a loving married couple who, when they’re not taking care of their little kids, find themselves intrigued with the couple in the apartment directly across from them, with no curtains.
Their neighbors are shameless young lovers, impassioned and energetic, their love displayed in the windows almost all the time. The married couple shake their heads at them, yet watch them throughout the year, casually, and sometimes with envy. Between struggling to make music for work and scrambling to get their kids to bed after a park stroll, the husband and wife lament to each other how they miss their youth. They miss the freedom, the energy, the excitement of having all the time in the world, of everything feeling new.
Then one day, they notice their favorite passionate love affair is slowing. Through the windows, they realize their neighbor is actually ailing. Then one day, dying, and taken away.
The wife hurries down to check on her surviving neighbor, left to grieve. As awkward as it is (I mean, what is she supposed to say, “hi, I’ve been watching you all year”?), you can tell she wants to offer any comfort to this stranger she’s come to care about. The widowed neighbor, surprisingly, recognizes her first.
Plot twist: the young lovers had been watching the married couple, too. They envy their stability, and their privilege of adding to their family. “You have such beautiful children…” the widow begins to cry. She can barely get her voice out as she describes the magical moments she saw in glimpses of their married life. The wife, stunned, comforts the widow without needing to say a word.
This short really stood out to me with its gentle message for those who struggle with jealousy: you never know what the other is going through, and you also do not realize what you take for granted. Someone may just as easily envy you, the short suggests, and with a new perspective maybe it helps to romanticize your own life.
It’s easy to romanticize what we don’t have. But how might we romanticize and better appreciate what gifts we have right now? What privileges, also, may we be aware of in our own lives, that we might understand another’s passionate longing for?
As a personal example, for me, it’s easy to romanticize, well, romance. It’s easy to envy this sweet and lovely experience I do not have. Coming to terms with my degrees of asexuality and aromanticism was not easy, especially when all the rage at my age now is dating and marriage. I had even feared that coming out would abort my chances of meeting someone perhaps God made for me.
But if I look from another perspective, someone might help me realize I live a beautiful life. I got to live my senior year in a college by the sea with four other writers (what are the chances??) and we still keep in touch every day years later, with annual Disneyland trips (obviously on pause for covid) and an ongoing chat where we’ve become even closer. I got to experience the kindness and God’s hospitality through a gay friend and a lesbian friend allowing me a place to stay when I needed it. I got to experience similar warmth and hospitality from two professor friends and their family. I got to survive the apocalyptic year of 2020 signing my first lease with a pan roommate who had come to be like my brother for a season. Such wonderful things I would not allow myself if I had stayed in the closet.
I geek out with a progressive church every Sunday and tune in with a queer christian group every week. I have a growing community of writers I see every month and we managed to stay in touch all this time. I have a tight-knit sister who is quite my opposite yet shares the absolute, most obscure movie in-jokes and discussions with me, and who supports me all the time. I have kinship and community, and live a life liberated from some constructs of heteronormativity and amatonormativity, and I am showing more people another light. None of that is lost or dimmed, but only colored and enhanced, by my asexuality and life driven by me saying platonic love matters.
This is not to brag “oh look how great my life is” any more than the neighbors’ transparency at the window was performing for anyone but just them loving life.
Now it’s your turn. Think from another perspective. How might you romanticize your life? What might be beautiful things you take for granted that you forget on your tired days, are actually a dream come true?