From beginning to end, the moment couldn’t have lasted more than three seconds. I never pause in my trek down O Street, even as I turn to stare at the window that’s suddenly caught my eye.

There’s an assortment of mugs drying on a dish towel, mismatched plates stacked on the counter and people bumping elbows while they fight to wash things over one tiny sink, laughing and weaving in and out of the doorway as they finish. The tail end of an early dinner party winding down, maybe. A pothos plant sits by the windowsill — beside it, an elaborate spice rack.

Something about these candid flickers of domestic happiness seem like the most beautiful and elusive thing in the world. I can’t resist stealing a glance for myself whenever I happen across them — studying them, like a sociologist called to scrutinize a phenomenon from behind the glass. Bearing witness to their happy togetherness imbues me with a curious secondhand warmth.

I can’t help but feel like these people have it all figured out. They’ve found and seized hold of the grail: the uncomplicated caritas of friends who don’t need you to be anything else to them; the sense of proximal found family, of happy togetherness that we search for in one another; a house that feels like a home. It’s the most beautiful and elusive thing in the world, and these people behind the window have found it. Or, at least, something dearly close to it.

To be clear, it’s not just the flurry of laughing, jostling people that’s making me fixate on all this. It’s also in the material clutter of the kitchen. The intimate, domestic clutter of my things sitting among your things, our lives and belongings entwining to create this corporeal space that we may call a home. Books, pens, bits of jewelry, wine bottles that we’ve collected because they were too pretty to throw out; light, personal vignettes, with just enough natural accumulation of mess to allude to a home genuinely lived in. There’s an implicit sense of fondness and trust to that. Hence, the act of home-building is traditionally conceived of as a romantic gesture, a natural progression of a relationship between two people when they decide to make each other their future. Still, it’s no less special between friends. 

What it distills down to, I think, is the inherent romance of knowing and being known. Amid the physical dance of learning to continuously be in someone’s space is a simultaneous process of mentally recalibrating to make room for each other. We divvy up drawers and bathroom counter space and find ways to have all our shoes fit by the door. We shift around our habits and our schedules and put ourselves through petty inconveniences in order to make room for these people we care about. Somewhere within all that compromising is a careful balance to be found, of course. But with it, our lives take on a different kind of luster; life becomes a little more cluttered, a little more cumbersome and a little more full. If we want the rewards of being loved, we must submit to the morbid ordeal of being inconvenienced. (Yes, I’m sure that’s how the line went.)

There are few things as precious and rare as finding people worth inconveniencing ourselves for. I think it’s what transfixed me that afternoon as I peered through the fading glow of the kitchen window. The graceless, tender scene of dishes, laughter and jostling elbows. Under the late summer sun, it felt like the most beautiful and elusive thing in the world.