Is there something beyond that grey wall outside your window, Podi? There used to be. Some time ago, there used to be a different house outside your window. It wasn't as tall and imposing as the one now, and it looked very old and very tired. But it was a house you and your window used to be able to talk to. It was a house you and your window used to love.
You and your window loved the same things -- the electric blue sky on many summer noons of your childhood, and the thick white clouds swirling lazily around it, like a living canopy holding an entire civilization of winged beings across the heavens. You used to tell each other stories what it would be like to live there, if it were any different from the world you're living in, or if it were the same.
You both loved how the same sky glimmered with stars at night, and how the Moon would rule over all, like a wise and ancient Matriarch watching its children in sacred slumber. You would both say good night at a different star each evening, and read to it a different book before you let it lull you to a dreamless sleep.
And there were the cats that lived in the broken, beaten-up black tire on the roof just outside your window. Getting home from school, you'd sit on the ledge and start talking with them (how familiar and comforting their smell would be to you), mewling and purring for minutes on end, telling them how your day went; how that one boy at school sat beside you in the library and asked about that book you were reading. The cats would sit in rapt attention, their faces in deep awe as if the secrets of the cosmos were about to be unlocked before their wide, mismatched, green/blue eyes. You wondered what the world would be like through a cat's eyes.
When it was raining, your windows would be watching you sketch. An elf, an angel, a fairy... but never finishing any of them. Always you would start out on the eyes, working your way through the face, then the hair (always long, always windswept), then the ears, down the neck, and then halfway through the body. By then it would be decided that you have fleshed out enough of this being's entire existence, and their half-life would be left undone on your sketchbook, their greyscale souls never fully realizing what it would be like to be alive.
Your window would be saddened at their tragic fate, and you would discover its ledges moistened with cold, cold tears.
It was just the rainfall, you would think halfheartedly, and make a move to finally close it. Your wrists would strain on the friction of old wood dragging on old wood, but it was getting late, and the last thing you needed was to be awake, letting Mother Moon see how you made your window cry.
But now -- now, things were different. Waking up this morning, opening the window, I find that the old house was gone. The black tire with the cats was gone. The sky was no longer visible, and the winged people have flown to a different universe to haunt another alien boy's waking dreams. The ancient magic has left, and it took the love of my window for me along with it. There was nothing but a lifeless old wood, opening and closing to a grey wall with nothing beyond it.
It was infinitely silent, and there was no soul beating inside it, but I love it none the less. I rub the thick cake of sleep that managed to cling to my eyes during the evening, and stretch my senses awake. I sit on the ledge of my open window, and inhale the grey things of a new morning.
I will wait, I find myself thinking. My window has taught me something valuable, and that is there is always something to love. Even in this desolate grey, there is always something to love.
