a wiNdow

She leaned back in her chair. The assignment seemed easy enough. The class was supposed to explore their relationships with others and express it as an artistic project. Broad enough that most of the students wouldn't complain, interesting enough to get some halfway decent results. You can do that sort of thing with an honors class. The teacher went on explaining things, answering questions, but Sarah tuned it out and reached into her bag for a pen. She titled her page "a wiNdow" and stopped to chew thoughtfully on her pen cap before continuing.

I was asked once by a friend to open the window. So I walked over, turned the latch, and pulled on it, but it wouldn't open. My friend was disappointed, as she hadn't been able to open it when she tried earlier, either. As I looked out, face close to the clear glass, it became foggy where my breath hit it. As I walked home from her house later that day, I thought about my own foggy glass and how people saw me through it. Anyone peering in only got a vague view of what they were looking at. Distorted shapes danced behind the frost, occasionally recognizable but usually not. Every time they picked out something they thought was vaguely familiar, their minds automatically changed it into whatever they had been looking for in the first place. I collected labels like dirt spots on neglected glass. I was the weird one, the geek, the loser. I was apparently a dirt spot on their glass, but they still looked in. Maybe trying to get a clearer picture of who I really was, maybe trying to find evidence towards their point of view with a solid form. My glass was too cloudy for them to see their reflections when they looked at it. It was a picture of me from any angle, and I saw pieces of myself in everyone else and pieces of them in me.

I peeked out from my side of the glass every day, trying to figure out the world out there. Everything I looked at had a little piece of my breath attached to it; it was all changed to my perspective. And through the me-stained glass, the world was a gorgeous place, full of inspiration and imagery. I decided then and there that I wanted everyone to be able to see the same world I saw, each scene so richly coloured, each spoken line so beautifully scripted. The world spoke poetry to me and I spent my time breaking apart the imagery, trying to find the meaning lying deep underneath.

Hurt by someone's bullet-pointed words and angry at the world, lines of rainwater ran down my glass face. As I sat crying in the corners of her room, my friend begged me again to open the window for her to let some fresh air and a new perspective in. I still didn't have the strength to do it, and she walked away disappointed and sat down on a tear-coloured couch that I knew was usually brown. I pulled shut my curtains and retreated from everyone's demands.

I built up strength inside those curtains; or rather, it built up and pressed against them. Over a few weeks, the frustration of not being understood and being stuck into little boxes all built up to an incredible strength that wanted to break out. I parted the curtains and looked out at the world without a misty semi-opaque border between it and me.

Ready to try to show myself, I found my friend. "I can open that window for you now," I said. She smiled quizzically and tilted her head, waiting. I stepped back and opened up the window. A breeze of fresh air rippled through, and I looked at her face. Finally unaltered by my distorting glass, I saw her smile at me. It was a pink smile, not discoloured by tinted glass or hidden by obscuring curtains. I dyed my curtains the colour of that smile and draped them around the sides of me, a comfort object, in case they were ever needed again and smiled back.

Around the border of the page, she doodled a glass face with tears streaming down it and smile-coloured curtains and slipped the page back into her notebook to hand in later. It was such a comfort to Sarah to know she'd been inspired and gotten something done, and it was honestly her art. And she was finally able to let some people see the world the way she did.