This Is Where I Live

Where I live is practically made of glass. Clear glass, frosted glass, stained glass, thick glass like windscreens, thin glass like lenses. My windows are so numerous that there is barely enough wall to form, well, anything you might be able to call a wall. They are constantly changing, shifting colours and blurring into different views. Which brings me to the view I have from these windows. That changes, too, almost as frequently and drastically as my windows do. Sometimes there are lush meadows reaching up to just below my windowsill, with daisies and bluebells smiling and nodding in their own secret language. Sometimes almost every window looks out on a rain-lashed ocean, furious waves and gray sheets of clouds, with water of such a dark shade of green that it almost reaches black splashing against my window panes. At these times, I know that if my windows decide to become thinner, I’d drown as the rolling seas outside break through them into my dwelling.

The view I get a lot of the time from various windows is of people. For instance, most of the time there is a handsome young man just outside one of my bedroom windows (the one that is usually tinted pale rose), so close his breath could mist up the glass. Yet my windows never fog up, and they never open. I’ve never really tried to open them, though. He always looks thoughtful and sage, with a sparkle in his eye. That’s my husband, Raphael. He’s a bit older now, but from that window, he always looks the same, and his window is one of the few that almost never changes colour. It’s always clear and exactly the same shade of rose.

Then there’s my best friend, Kim. She’s got a window almost always to herself, although she’s already married. Her husband, Peter, drifts in and out of that view occasionally. Her window is stained a light blue, and she always has this mischievous grin on her face, as well as the same pencil tucked behind her ear. Which is how she looked when I first saw her in college.

Over most of these windows I have curtains, some partly drawn, some drawn away from the window altogether and tied back, a few hanging over the window for as long as I can remember. Some I remember drawing over the view, like the one I know is my first love’s window. I tried to look at someone else through his window, but I just couldn’t see anyone besides him, in that silly hat he turned up for our first date in. His window is smokey gray glass, frosted and blurred, but I know if I tie back the curtains now, I’ll still see him there through the mistiness. I have gauzy curtains hanging over some windows, like my parents’. I never did tell them that I had a boyfriend in high school, if only for a week.

The only room without any windows is my storeroom. I have things in there that even I don’t know about. Sometimes things disappear from other rooms and end up in there, like the book I borrowed from the library and never returned. Sometimes there are sheets of paper in there as well, of every shade and shape, with little messages on them in my writing, always in black technical pen. Stuff like, ‘Dad’s Birthday’ or ‘Buy apples’ or even sometimes notepads filled with my writing, details of stories, incidents, things I don’t remember writing. The weird thing is, my storeroom isn’t always there. Sometimes the door won’t open. Sometimes I can’t find what I’m looking for in it, only to have it turn up later. Go figure.

Things change, where I live. The furniture stays where it is, basically. The bed is always next to Raphael’s window and under the window that looks out onto my hometown in Spain (which, incidentally, is normally white frosted glass). Sometimes the sheets are green, with embroidered white flowers, and sometimes they’re plain purple. Once after watching a documentary on Arabia, the sheets were silk and cotton, dyed brilliant orange and saffron.

I’ve got two bedrooms with attached bathrooms, although I only ever use the same one. The other one is my childhood bedroom, with a freize of wild swans all around, wallpapered onto the slivers of wall and stained onto the windows. This room changes the least; the wallpaper never peels, the windows are always frosted glass, although the colour has been known to shift.

My study has one huge panel of a window and three smaller ones on each bordering wall. Of all these, not one has curtains or drapes, and they change most frequently. In this room is the most paper. Memo pads, typewritten sheets, notebooks and sketchbooks, all sorts of things in my own hand and style, based on what I see from these windows. I remember one time when I couldn’t see anything from my study. Everything was just plain white, like someone had set up a giant screen outside the windows. Around this time, a really nasty tempest started raging outside the majority of the rest of my windows. Only certain ones, like Raphael’s, Kim’s and those in my second bedroom, didn’t change, although the glass certainly turned a little darker. The sheets were all black that time, and it was only when things began to clear up that they changed back to my purple covers.

Downstairs the floors are tiled with marble, upstairs with hardwood. There are no balconies, no gardens. I have only one exit, which is simply a door in one of the hallways. It never opens usually, although I don’t try it very often. When the terrible storm was at its height, I tried it and the knob turned, but something peculiar happened then. I stopped and went back upstairs and looked out the windows that hadn’t changed, at my husband and my hometown. Then I walked over to the storeroom, which was there on that try, and I took a look at some papers that had appeared there, things I had written and felt and seen and thought. When I had finished, I went back down, and the door wouldn’t open. I remember how the doorknob felt like a gun in my hand, and how letting go and walking away felt like being reborn.

But this is a little silly. Where do I live? Not in Spain, which I visit yearly. Not in America, where Raphael and I met, and where we work and stay. Not anywhere in the tangible universe. I live in myself, in my mind, where life comes to life. Where I am free to imagine, to think and to dream, I am truly alive. This is me. This is where I live.

(This is what I came up with for this title, which I stumbled across.)