My room had one window. My room was shaped like the roof with a prominent downward slope. The window looked like a regular window. A 5 sided box of sorts. I enjoyed looking out through my window. Jeff, the son of my father´s wife, had an identical room on the other side of the hallway. A stairway leading down to the living room divided the rooms. He was two years younger than I. He had the same size room and same size window that I had. I always notice windows. I have always been aware of space outside. Perhaps because of my asthma, I always equated breathing with what one did easier outside, as it was usually a struggle inside.
I was 5, the first time I remember windows . My mother ran to the piano and laid the glass ornaments on the floor. She scooped me up and we stood under the door frames . The windows rattled as the earthquake from Alaska rocked our house. I remember the rattling of the windows the most. It was like they wanted to come out of their frames. It sounded like people laughing. The next window I remember was a car window. I watched my father walk away from our car and get into another car. Those windows did not seem to laugh.
It has followed me, this window watching. I will lose myself in the nothing I see through a window. Like small frames that capture moments of nothing, nothing has captured my attention since I can remember. Sitting, then, on the floor in my upstairs bedroom; the guitar propped up between my knees as I look out the window, it seemed like “nothing ” was better out there. “Nothing” was going to be alright out there. “Nothing”needed to be a certain way when I looked out there. “Nothing” was disappointed or confused when I looked. The telescope of my window, during my stay with my father and his wife and her son, would shift-shape into a microscope, later in life. What I saw through my window, then, balanced with what I saw in me; through the house; in the nothing that was my heart.
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