#my journalistic instinct kicked in and i ran outside and did some reporting and sent it to streetsblog

[abbysroad]

witness

I was bothered all day by this story I heard on NPR about a woman who observed the lives of the young couple living in the apartment across the street, in direct view from her own. They were naked all the time, and with the head of their bed situated just below their bay windows, she could see them having sex. Seven or eight months passed when she didn’t seem them in the apartment as often. Then, over the course of weeks, she watched the boyfriend wither away in his bedroom from some type of illness. She watched as people came to say their goodbyes. She watched as he died, with his girlfriend and his mother by his side. And, when the coroner came to take away the body, she ran outside and watched it getting hauled away. Should she have looked away? Was her voyeurism immoral? That was the gist of the show.

In the afternoon, my roommate knocked on my door. “Something awful happened outside, if you want to see it out of morbid curiosity,” he said. My boyfriend and I ran to his bedroom and looked out the window. For the next half hour, we watched the scene of a fatal crash where a motorcycle hit and killed a pedestrian, right below our apartment. Really gruesome shit, the body, the blood. And I couldn’t look away.