Dear Diary:

When I learned the Stephen Sondheim song “What More Do I Need?,” I marveled at the lines “My windowpane has a lovely view/ an inch of sky and a fly or two/ why I can see half a tree/ And what more do I need?”

There’s nothing like a New York apartment to make you wish you could sit down with Sondheim and add a verse.

When I was in my early 20s, a suburban girl new to New York, in love with musicals and the city itself, I was full of hope and possibility.

So I thought nothing of wandering into West Village apartment buildings and asking about vacancies. The bureaucratic barriers designed to make this impossible meant nothing. I just asked.

One day the doorman at a building I loved said there was a studio open.

“The man who rented it,” he explained, and then paused, “is missing.”

The apartment was tiny but charming. It was also full of the missing tenant’s belongings: a tattered sofa bed, clothes in the closet, a little coffee maker, turquoise towels and an ottoman emblazoned with the Baltimore Orioles logo.

It was as if he had simply stepped out one day in the middle of his life.

I took it immediately, but somehow it still felt like his. I kept everything as it was in case he ever came back. He was my invisible roommate.

Time passed. I fell in love and needed a bigger place. One day in the elevator, a neighbor turned to me.

“My husband has left me,” she said. “I can’t afford my apartment.”

“Why don’t we swap?” I said.

We shook hands, and the next day she inherited my studio, and my invisible roommate. I don’t know if he ever returned, but in a sense, he never left.

— Melissa Errico