As I watched him from my secret vantage point, I remembered how, when I first moved into Donald’s house, we used to stay up late every night talking, comparing our previous lives, before we knew each other, in New York, to our current life together in Washington. The superficials always came up short. We were transplants; out of our element; our heartrates and metabolisms and extremely delicate psychological equilibriums still in the process of readjustment. We had the same complaints about Washington (dull food; dull people; a lot of bad shoes and haircuts); we missed the same things about New York (the food; the people; the access to good shoes and haircuts), but were oddly tickled by the occasional “celebrity” sightings our new town afforded us: Tim Russert carrying a pizza box to his car; Cokie Roberts shopping at the Bethesda Safeway; Irving R. Levine making his way through National Airport. Neither of us, though, if given the choice and opportunity, would ever have moved back. Each of us had left to find a better life, and despite the overwhelming and at times excruciating boringness of the place we’d chosen to do it in, we had succeeded. We had found each other; we had moved in together; and now we were on the threshold of setting out on that precarious path into the proverbial darkness: Our Future.

So what if the people around us carried canvas tote bags with public television and radio insignia emblazoned on them and brought their lunches to work in Tupperware containers?

Those nights after we’d talk about New York—the pizza; the baked goods (it almost always started with food, it seemed); the apartments we’d lived in; the streets we’d loved; the dirt and stress and sense of claustrophobia, both physical and psychological, we’d hated—at my insistence we’d turn on A&E or the Discovery Channel and watch one of those Raging Planet shows about tornadoes, avalanches, tidal waves; or a true-crime reenactment program. People ripped from their beds, swept away in mud slides or buried alive in snow; serial killers; men who murdered their families; bodies dug up and then identified, forensically, miraculously, from a single hair, or one remaining fingernail; we’d both fall silent at the parade of human tragedy played out before us.

At first Donald hated those programs, couldn’t understand my perverse fascination with them (neither could I, actually). Soon, though, he pointed to my intractable sense of Gloom and Doom as the one obvious answer.

And maybe it was.

Gloom. Doom. Death. Dying.

Dismemberment. Decapitation. Defenestration.

It certainly made sense on the surface.

But though I didn’t know it then and could never have articulated it even if I had, in retrospect I think it was just the opposite.

It was like opening a bedroom window on a freezing cold winter night for the sole purpose of feeling warm under the covers.

Curled up on the couch in the dark with Donald watching those shows, listening to the grisly details of each natural disaster, each crime and the criminal who had committed it, I felt safe. Protected. Locked deep inside the nucleus of those moments for me was the furthest thing from negativity and pessimism. It was gratitude—for what I’d found and for what I now had: a home; a life; Donald.