Short Story

Looking out the window is a curious sort of hobby to take up, you think. It’s like conversations! There is a plain barrier between you and what’s on the other side, yet every once in awhile,you catch a glimpse of your own reflection against the frosty pane.

There is a common geniality shared amongst all windows, in a very odd sense (being that they are indeed, inanimate) because they are—for all intents and purposes, made to be ignored, yet they do not complain; they do not wail on about how they are forgotten and only ever seen past and not directly, and they do not—you think—repeat secrets.

They see so much! How much have the windows in your room seen? Those passive blockades, keeping out the unwanted cold and the brazen, nighttime intruder—they see so much… if you let them. Because, indeed, they will occasionally not be made privy to the happenings of the inside of a home—they will instead be covered by the tattered, stained drapes that laid across the lilting rods, hung with little care as to the balance of it, and then you are alone.

This was the way you liked it. You preferred being alone, and you preferred the drapes closed. Those windows had seen far too much already. They had seen the things you weren’t proud of, the things you would rather have closed up and shoved far down beneath the frigid, earthen soil, and the things that you would rather forget ever occurred within the confines of that room.

It had been awhile since you had left that room, though, hadn’t it? Living off the water from the faucet in the back of the home, the food that was brought to your doorstep from what friends you had left, and the books saying things like, “Once more unto the breach”, reminding you that you had to face the things you’d rather turn away from… “Summon up the blood…”

At first, it was only days that had passed. You were able to say, “I’m taking my time.” But then weeks passed, and “taking time” became the sort of obsessive excuse one makes when in the mire-filled pit they’ve given up trying to crawl out of; and after the first month, the friends that had stuck around to observe your guilt-ridden reclusive-self, gave up also.

But on the 9th day of the second month, the sun shone through the clouds in the early morning; and as the dew was lifted from the grass and branches as ghostly wisps, so too were your spirits. You flung off the wool blanket that covered your ready body, shoved on your pair of winter boots and threw the door open, letting in the cold, January air. Then, glancing to the drapes that held in the pain, you rushed over to your windows and tore the drapes down—curtain rod and all. You needn’t ever hide, again. You are made new. You are loved.