Window

His own voice echoed in his head as his hands were thrust against the pockets of his worn-out sweater.

It was four o’ clock. The sky was ablaze with light, tinting the roof of his house with a deep crimson gold. His heavy thumps on the wooden stairs sounded around the house, waking the sleeping child in the room next to his. His mother had warned him more than often not to do that—to think that she should have been tired of scolding him by now.

He shut the door to his room, locked it, threw his bag to a corner, and collapsed on the bed. He heard his mother muttering something like “rotten kid” to herself as she went up the stairs to quiet the youngster, not even knocking to check if her first child was fine.

No one ever bothered to ask him how he was anymore, and with that, he’s learned to succumb into his own isolation. They didn’t care that he was flunking his subjects, or that he was an alcoholic (much like many other students his age), or that he had a regular meeting with the school shrink because he “had a problem”. No, they didn’t care at all.

He was literally counting the seconds as he lay on the bed, not minding the many books he’d brought home so he could “study”. He reached under his bed and grabbed a bottle. He popped off the cap, drank, and finished it just as easily as he had thrown it into the trash bin.
He was only 13— turning 14 by next month, but he was more of an alcoholic than any other boy or man older than him. Maybe it’s because of his father—because he was an alcoholic, himself; or because he was in and out before the new baby was born. He was only 10, back then. Maybe it was because of his mother, who was just as broken as he was— left to raise a family on her own. He loved his mother, even if she didn’t love him.

He got off the bed, stumbled a little bit from dizziness, and leaned on the black window pane. It was surprising how, in the past 13 years of his life that he spent living in their house, that he never actually looked looked out this window. Maybe in all the times he really DID look out this window…he was either sleepwalking, distracted, or just plainly drunk. He only realized, then, how isolated he was, trapped inside a cage that he’d built for himself— not to keep himself in, but to keep everyone out.

At the moment, there really wasn’t much to look at. All he could see was their neighbor’s beige wall; their wide back yard; a bay window on their second floor, just about a meter to the left from his own; and another wide window to the right. It wasn’t a mansion, but it wasn’t a shack either. Not too shabby, but not too elegant. It was just right. It seemed like the kind of house that only exists in the world of miniature dolls, or the kind where the one-big-happy-family neighbor lived. For some absurd reason, the house seemed like a trick of the light— like it’s something that only existed in his dreams.

He looked into the window to his right. The glass was exceptionally clean, framed from the inside by a frilly blue curtain. The walls of the room, he could see, were painted white decorated everywhere with detailed butterflies of assorted colors. On the door was a poster of a ballerina, elegantly positioned to reveal her hourglass figure, her head tilted back in a graceful fashion. Beside it was a bookshelf, filled with pocket books, scrap books, memory albums, and many other books of many other kinds. Around the corner was a queen-sized bed, draped with a thick white cotton fabric. On the headboard leaned white teddy bears of different shapes and sizes, and around each of its necks were different pastel-colored ribbons that glimmered with glitter and silver studs— which, he had presumed, to be a collection.

The door to the room opened, and there stood a tall, skinny girl. She was just about his age, he had guessed, although her rosy skin proved otherwise. He saw her release her long brown hair from the tight bun, leaving curls and waves. He saw her carefully place her ballet bag inside her closet, and admire the red silken leotard and tutu inside, tracing every golden stud and button. He could tell how much she had wanted to wear it soon, to show it off as she danced center stage. Her lips curled into a smile, and he could sense a hint of pride and excitement, and at the same time, nervousness and fear. What if she got something wrong? What if she wasn’t beautiful and graceful enough? What if all she’d worked for would not be good enough? Questions raced through her mind, he could tell, just as fast as they had rushed into his. Almost in an instant, he felt sympathy for her, living her life to the expectations of other people; for once in his life, he found that those who were, are, perfect were not so perfect after all.

He saw her make her way to the bed, sitting down with the utmost care. She winced slightly as she pulled her knees to her chest, massaging her bleeding toes (he swore that he saw a slight glimmer of tears in her eyes). The way that her smile faded, the way her lip quivered from pain, and the way that the tears finally came rolling down her cheeks was heart-breaking. The world, he thought, was crueler than he thought it had been. Being perfect came with a heavy price— she was a fragile young lady, a perfect, beautiful, graceful, fragile young lady.

What was this? Was he feeling sympathy? Was he feeling? It seemed like such along time since his heart felt the burden of grief. He found himself alien to the feeling of a heavy heart and empathy. For some unknown reason, the very fact that he was feeling meant so much to him that the sadness didn’t hurt as much as it was supposed to.

He gazed at her intently, piercing his eyes into every single detail on her pretty, no, beautiful face. Her long lashes curled lightly; her eyes…yes, her eyes. They were nothing like he’d ever seen before. Her eyes were so impossibly perfect. They were in a shade of very, very light blue (so intensely blue that you could see them clearly even from a distance) reflected with the swirling colors of dusk, which makes them look like swirls of red, blue, and purple— much like the sunset, in itself.

Her eyes flickered to his direction and his flickered away.

He tapped his fingers on the window pane uneasily, beating the impulse to look back at her. He didn’t want to look at the stupid sunset. It would happen every single day a year, but seeing her that way, it was different— it was more unlikely (and undeniably more worthwhile) than meteor showers, or eclipses, or rainy-yet-sunny days. Undeniably worthwhile, indeed.

He dared to look back, just to take one glance— just to see if she was still looking. His eyes slowly moved toward the direction of the wide window.

For what your heart is set to do, your body will follow— that’s what they always say. Or maybe, at least…that’s what he always thinks he hears. That’s what he believes.
Maybe that was what was happening to him now. His heart was set to follow the girl of his dreams.

Hah. That sounded nice: the girl of his dreams. In his dreams. He was completely out of her league— everything he couldn’t even dream of being, she was; everything he couldn’t even try to do, she did; and the very life he couldn’t even have in his wildest fantasies, she was living.

Funny how life works, he thought. For his whole life, he learned to push people away, and treat them like dirt, just as they’ve treated him. But this one person who doesn’t even know he exists, is so reachable he could lean forward a few inches to brush his finger against her hair— that one person he saw as perfect, and the one he would willingly give his heart to, was so reachable, yet still very far away.

How could he have been to utterly stupid to have fallen for someone so perfect, so flawless?

This was why he stopped feeling in the first place. Because feeling meant hurting— such a heavy price to pay for something so simple. How easy it was to feel, to be sad when his father left. How easy it was to hate when his mother hated him back. How easy it was to fall in love with someone you can never have.

This was why he stopped hurting…at least, he thought he did. Because hurting was the hardest part of it all. Everything that starts so simply has a not-so-simple ending. It was hard to let go of rage, to release all the anger, and just learn to forgive his father for everything he had done for…to his family. It was hard to love his mother through it all— it was hard to return hate with love.

Now, he thought, I would be hard, once again, to let go now that he had a hold of it. He would have to go through it all again— the tears, the hurt, the pain. It would be hard to move on. He was tired of watching his hopes fall, but he had to.
He had to.

Somehow, feeling never really looked as bad as it was.