Windowpain- Meghan Jacoby

There is a window that is dark and grey and stained with the tears of those who have been there before, and there sits a girl in a chair in the corner who searches for something through the grey-blue streaks. There is dust on the floor and a heavy heart thudding above the floorboards, and steps are painful but they’re necessary to move. Movement is needed, movement is wanted, movement is every part of every soul and change is inevitable but the window remains the same.


Outside there is a tree and a swing that sways lightly in the breeze, or at least, that’s what she imagines it to look like, and a blue sky that reflects the world and seas that are capped with white. It is colors and imagination and it is waiting outside if only she could see it, then she would know that it is true. Outlines in the dust of waves and heartaches course over her like tides, waxing and waning with the thumpthumpthump of her heartbeat. Crashing against her, she strains her eyes against the window to look outside. Out here, out here, it calls to her. There is a world. There is a life.

But then again, she is breathing. Then again, she is existing. Then again, there is a sense of beating within her, a flow of blood that presses to the surface and itches to run free. There are joints in her legs that beg to creak, to sprint within the tall grass that must lay outside. This imagination is where her mind may play, but her body is trapped within. Movement is needed, movement is wanted, movement is every part of her soul. Change is inevitable.

The window starts to change. She takes a rag of her clothes, dull and off-white, smattered with inkblots and whispers of another promise, and takes to the window. She paints on the obscure surface, streaks of sky and sun and trees and grass. She swipes and slashes, flowing. Breathing. Dust rises and settles again angrily as she trespasses the limits she has once given herself. It all does not add up. There are layers of filth and grime that seem to never seem to come off. Outside, the world seems as dark as the room she is in.

One day, it is clear enough that she can start to see through. There is the tree, a rope attached to it. There is the field, tall grass beckoning. The sky is more blue than gray. The world is a color mended together with stitches of her hopes and dreams. She is viewing life. She is viewing all she ever could imagine. Day after day, she looks out. Outward and upward.

But colors are colors and they never fade and the brightness often hurts her eyes because she can’t comprehend the other idea of dark and light, gray and white. The world is beautiful but it never changes. The chair always creaks, while the grass blows the same way in the wind. There must be a balance somewhere, or she would go crazy. She must find a balance somehow, or she will go crazy.

There is a flower that sits on the edge of the sky and the grayness and it grows tall and strong and when she finally looks down it exists.



“Normally, we do not so much look at things, as overlook them.” – Alan Watts.