Leftover Blissville

It feels like an epoch ago when a colleague at work discovered Blissville on his own. He is a city reporter, and he and his sweetheart, now his wife, would spend their weekends exploring the neighborhoods at the city's fringes. He came into the work the Monday after and told me all about it and the twin houses he'd discovered.

He wondered if one of them was for sale. He and his beloved were house-hunting. The size, the history, the neighborhood, they were all perfect.

I had no answer for him. I hadn't even known about these houses. That night I walked with my own sweetheart around the neighborhood, and I fell in love with them, too. Each was as perfect a house as I could imagine. One even looked empty. But neither was for sale. I reported back and then forgot about them. A year later my colleague and his darling bought a house at the edge of Prospect Park.

Then a few years later the house on the right went on the market. It was more rundown than its neighbor, and the brokers priced it at a half a million. Outside the deli a handmade flier advertised an open house. The price was now three quarters of a million. I walked down the block, around the corner and up the block to the houses I loved. People filed in and out, but I didn't go in. I wanted it too much.