The Windows

The Windows

Fried pork wafts in through the east-facing window. From this window, on clear days, you can see the mountains against the silhouette of palms and rooftops. Rare dark clouds in the distance, and the new cold wet, gives this view a tropical tint. I could be in Brazil, children running barefoot below, or China with banana trees dipping into the mud. I’ve seen these clouds before on different continents in different times. My age shifts with the season, flight schedule, moon phase. Later, the smell of pot wafts in through the window.

The South facing windows are tricky. They look straight into the building next to me. But my floor is a few feet higher, so my hierarchy is pre-established. On hot days, BBQ smoke fills my apartment from across the alley. Later, in the darkness, drunken men hang off the railing and a blonde child with large buckteeth peer into my space through the bottoms of their bottles and with red laser pens. I give quiet discerning motherly scolds and shut the bamboo shades.

The other east-facing window is not allowed to be open anymore. For a while it had the most freedom and allowed a silky breeze straight passage from sea to land. It allowed all alley sounds in. Drunken homeless men would sing in my ears and the morning clanking of glass bottles in black bags would be the normal schedule of summer. Eventually the heat drove the flies up into my apartment through the screenless mouth, and they would swirl in geometric patterns in the center of the room. This cloud was unwanted, bagged, released. The window was silenced once and for all.

When laying on my bed, the view from the south facing windows is poetic and space age. The sky is blue and silver planes slowly pierce fluffy white clouds silently. There is one grey shingled rooftop slanting against the sun with a field of silver mushroom tops: pipes piping nothing. One large palm tree is always moving. Its dread head with golden dying leaves shakes slowly reflecting the sun on its flaxen skin, shimmering like the surface of an Indian summer pool. At night the moon moves through clouds and when everyone is still, the ocean waves crash.

I can see a man on the top floor of the building with the squeaky metallic garage doors. When we sing, he spies on us. The girl below sings into her microphone a long droning chant, a pop song gone flat. I can see the back of her head. In the alley someone has painted with white paint “I love U” for someone above me to see. I spy on the old Mexican woman that digs in the trash and the dog walkers heading for the park. I play my piano and pretend I am a man in the alley looking up at the east-facing window, listening in awe.

One evening while I singing and playing my guitar, a man yells up from the street below the south facing windows.
"Lady with the guitar singing?!"
I stick my head out and see nothing but a black mass in the alley.
"Yes! I'm sorry, am I being too loud?"
"No, I wanted to tell you that you sound beautiful. Good luck."

I close all the windows and continue playing, quietly.