Grendel and I walked up Iroquois Street almost every evening, rain or shine, hot or starting to get cool, and sometimes we saw one or both of the couple and many times we didn’t. When we saw them, they were working in the yard together, cutting the grass or raking leaves. We saw them sitting on the porch, having a drink or reading. We saw them entertaining friends, a group of young people gathered around the dining room table. And we saw them together or alone inside the house, watching TV, eating, painting the dining room.

They were constantly working on the house. Landscaping, carpeting, gutters. Something was always being removed or installed, replaced or painted over. I never spoke to them, only exchanged a wave that first time. But I assumed they were newlyweds living in their first house, and so they attacked the project of being homeowners with the gusto only the young could generate. I imagined the trajectory of their lives—upward. Once that house on Iroquois was whipped into shape and beautiful, they would sell it and move to a larger home. Maybe a child would be born while they still lived there. Maybe they’d put that off and have their children later. Promotions at work, money socked away in a retirement account.

I thought of those early days with Emily and Jake. The little apartment we lived in while I was in graduate school. When Jake used to wake us up during the night, crying, I used to drag myself across the room to comfort him. And I worried I wouldn’t be able to do it all—work, teach, write, provide. Be a parent. I thought of that time as a series of endless anxieties.

But I wish every day I could go back and live it all over.

I never once felt envy for that couple in the blue house. I never really wanted to be them.

But I did wonder what it was like to be them. To be at the start of it all, not to know what lies ahead. Not to carry the burden of knowing something precious had already been taken away. To see everything as possible.

To be so consumed by each other, to be so intensely possessed of love and desire that late nights and languid mornings were given over to fucking without the interruptions of children or exhaustion or aging. To be in every moment, physically and emotionally.

And maybe I looked too much. Maybe my gaze lingered too long on them. Maybe I seemed odd or off as I walked by. The lonely guy with his mutt.

On a dozen occasions, when loneliness and grief gripped me like a boa constrictor, I took Grendel for a walk in their neighborhood after midnight. Instead of going to the cemetery, I went over there, hoping for a glimpse of that couple. Usually their blinds were closed. Sometimes the house was already dark.