This is my window. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

In summer, green leaves press against the brittle glass of my window, as though they sense my unease and are compelled to reach out. Unknowingly helpful, yet helpless.

In winter, dead branches scratch and wood rattles against wood. Dark and cold penetrate my window early and often and I diminish in stature with every breath of frozen air until I’m nothing again.

Flowers bud and bloom, fade and die and all the time I watch them from the space between the stillness I know exists because I can see it and the frantic movement beneath the surface that I know exists but can’t.

Bud and bloom, fade and die.

My window exhales cold air and inhales warm and I sit and shiver or sit and sweat. It make no difference to my window. My window is dully impervious to everything but physical blows.

Like me.

If I see through my window, then it sees through me.

It watches silently as I conjure the worlds behind which I hide. It knows my secrets and lies but my window keeps them, as indifferent to the febrile, swollen tendrils of hope coiling about me, embracing and holding me tightly, as it is when they wither and weaken and drop me to the indifferent grey asphalt below.

It means nothing to me and I to it and yet when I can no longer stare through it, I will feel its absence as keenly as I feel my own mortality.

Bud and bloom. Fade and die.