A rush of cold air entered the living room through an open window, sending the gossamer curtain flying. She caught it for a fleeting moment, allowing the air to softly reclaim control and wrap it around the windowpane. The curtain did not conceal the outside world; by opening the window, she had relinquished all power over her surroundings and left it to the air. The wind could not hurt her, but it excited her senses with its erratic gusts. It could make her feel.
She watched the clock that rested upon her wide desk. While stacks of paper collected dust on one half of it, on the other half there laid a digital clock and a dim lamp. Light never reached the stacks of paper, and she never planned to lay an eye upon a single sheet. Whenever she sat at her desk, she stared into the abyss between the curtain and the window whose restless mouth spoke its silent verses as if beckoning her into the unknown. On the street, other windows lined other apartment buildings, and she was petrified by the uniformity of it all. These windows were not open and their curtains did not serve as barricades to the world. She sat by the window and never at it. She looked to the window and never through it.
She kept the window open so she could be part of the city without witnessing its despair. She preferred living in solitude to shutting her window. The night air was a valuable friend, filling the room with the spirit of all it has touched while whispering stories of the outside world that made her pulse accelerate and her skin crawl. As the lights burned bright through the rows of impenetrable windows, the night sounds were carried into her room. She enjoyed listening to the muffled conversations and tried to recall the sound of her own voice.
As her last conversation crossed her mind, she stole a glance at her front door. The large, steel frame stood adjacent to the window. The motion was habitual, and she had forgotten why she was so afraid of the door long ago. She knew that the root of her fear rested in the human tendency to appear at front doors rather than at open windows. The only person who came to her front door each month was her landlord, seizing her meager paycheck and plodding down the five flights of stairs. The hallways were dark enough that she only ever discerned her neighbors’ silhouettes. Sunlight never seeped into the somber apartment building, which saved her from interpersonal relations. In the apartment, she absorbed all of the daylight, dancing through sunbeams that escaped through the curtain’s thin fabric. Warped shadows spread across the suppressing white walls, leaving the front door in unbearable near-darkness. Perhaps it was the striking glass peephole that perpetually projected the murky green color of the hallway into the room that scared her the most. If she wanted a window to the rest of the building, she would open it. But she did not have a choice.
A gust of wind rustled the skirt of her dress, and she looked down to analyze its fluid gestures. The dress resembled the curtain in its restive folds and twirls, its infinite nature being contradicted by the abrupt essence of its knee-kissing terminus. When she danced in the wind, her dress swam into the depths of eternity, but after a short spell, the wind left it indefinitely. When her dress was not wreathing through the air, the emptiness that pervaded her life spilled over her immobile body. The wind made her truly believe in her own beauty, though she was beginning to forget the shape of her nose and how far apart her eyes were.
She sat at the nearly empty half of her desk, inspecting the digital clock and reveling in the lamp’s muted glow. The sky was a deep, contaminated indigo that sank into the distance. She remembered summers in the country as a child, when the sky boasted billions of stars each night, demanding the attention and admiration of every eye that met the evening air. In the city, the glaring lights on the ground stole all of the attention to save humans the trouble of craning their necks and observing natural phenomena. She pitied the city sky, but shared its shame, as other windows were luminous and hers displayed simply a dying light. She spoke to it, inviting the night sky to join in her idle lifestyle, but it was always too timid to respond. She sent messages through the gusts of wind, and once in a while, when she felt the least alone, she knew a part of the sky had visited to savor the soft light and reminisce about the stars.
Even if the stars had offered her their friendship, she would have declined because they never attempted to combat the city lights below. They never accepted their place in the night sky, just as she could not comprehend her position on the façade of the apartment building. She could not befriend something that shared her outlook on life, because then it would trap her in her own mind. The wind was carefree, spending most of its time laying upon the sidewalk and sliding through space. She needed to feel inferior to the wind, because it reminded her to have aspirations.
The curtain rustled in the wind, disclosing a hand that led to an arm. The hand collapsed into a soft fist and rapped on the windowpane a few times. Her brow furrowed, she approached the unfamiliar hand and studied it in the dim light. With more ferocity, its knuckles crashed against the iron frame once more. She yearned to shut the window and call for help, but curiosity prevailed over her conscience.
“C-come in.” Her quiet voice rang through the night. She wished to capture the words and force them back into her mouth, but they had escaped into the abyss. A circumspect figure crawled through the window, barely catching the lamp’s light. She looked away, unable to bear the thought that the window shared the same purpose as the front door. Once she opened her eyes, she beheld a tall young man dressed in black.
“Sorry,” he said flatly. “Did I scare you?”
She studied his face, attempting to decipher the color of his eyes in the light. “How did you get up here?”
“I saw an open window,” he explained, “so I climbed the fire escape to check it out. But I’ll leave if you want.”
“Why would you come here?”
“I don’t have a place to stay, and I decided that someone who keeps their window open in January might be accommodating.” With a complacent smirk, he tilted his head out the window to assess his climb. As her eyes adjusted to his face, she realized he was approximately her age.
“Well, I don’t know how you came to that conclusion just by seeing my open window,” she said, folding her arms. “Anyway, you can’t stay here.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, turning toward her. When his eyes focused on hers, she could see that they were grey.
“I don’t know you! You just came into my apartment. Through the window, no less.” She spoke quickly, becoming increasingly indignant with his insolence.
“I can tell you don’t have many guests.” He smirked again, moving away from the window and into the lamplight. “You would’ve called the police by now if you wanted me to leave. If you didn’t want me to stay, you would’ve already told me to go.”
“Do you like the stars?”
“Excuse me?” He chortled, baring straight white teeth that resembled a row of bright windows across the desolate street. “I suppose I do, but I haven’t seen a star in years.”
“Then you can’t stay here.” She receded into a faint shadow, taking a seat at her desk.
“What? Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You should be getting on now.”
“You’re going to make me sleep out in the cold? There aren’t even any stars in the sky! I’m completely indifferent to astronomy, honestly.” Anguish resonated in his voice.
“Fine. You can stay. But you won’t be very warm,” she said, glancing at the clock. She nervously tapped her bare foot against the wooden floor. The night air obscured her judgment. If the winter sun were shining through the curtain, she would send the grey-eyed man through the abyss once more. But the night incited a destructive audacity within her that her frail bones could not contain.
“Thank you,” he said sincerely, inching closer to her seated figure. He extended his hand, and she was reluctant to meet it with her own. He shook her hand firmly, and his grin captivated her. “I just need a roof over my head. You see, I’ve taken a break from my home to explore the world.”
“What do you mean?”
“I spent too much time hiding from my obligations,” he said. “I intended to get much further on my trek, but I have no one to see and nowhere to go.”
“There’s no shame in keeping to yourself,” she thought aloud. “Why should I go out there when I have my window?”
“Not really,” he remarked. “You don’t use it. You sit there, in the dark. You don’t look outside. If you did, maybe you wouldn’t be afraid. And that’s exactly what you’re scared of: being unafraid.”
“You can’t just come into my apartment and make false assumptions about me,” she said, her soft voice quivering with exasperation. “You don’t know me at all!”
“That’s true.” He nodded, the side of his mouth stretching into a smirk. “But you don’t want me to know you. You like anonymity because you think it keeps you safe. But look at me – a stranger! – standing in your living room after coming through your fifth-floor window. I could be a murderer. I could be a thief. But you didn’t ask, and you don’t want to know. You just don’t want to be alone.”
“You don’t know anything about me! Who do you think you are?”
“I believe you and I are more similar than you think,” he said, moving forward. Her body stiffened as he drew near. He broke the eye contact, averting his attention toward the window. “But hey, I could be wrong.”
“Well, you are wrong!” she shouted, jolting upward as his startled eyes met hers. His eyes held a mystifying magnetism that left her limbs limp. “You just want to pin your issues on me. You’re banking on our similarities because you don’t want to be the only coward in this city!”
“Alright, I apologize,” he said, lifting his arm. His hand hovered above her shoulder, but the magnetic field between their skin kept him from making contact. She flinched, as if his touch would bring her extreme pain. He lowered his hand, but dove deeper into her uneasy gaze. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
The last time someone had hurt her, she was lying beneath the stars, immersed in a bed of tall grass. Someone was beside her, and though the grass concealed their faces from each other, they knew they were not alone. Someone held her hand and they spoke about the stars, and how they could never know the constellations. With their free hands, they passed a bottle of wine back and forth that was the color of the sky above. There were no buildings to obstruct their view, and after a heated debate, they identified the big dipper. As time passed their hands gripped one another, forming an indestructible bond. They laughed for hours, shouting about everything and nothing because no one was there to hear them.
On that same night, her ears rang and her heart raced as her limbs went limp in someone’s embrace. She found herself loving someone wholeheartedly in a span of a few hours, and she could feel someone’s rapid pulse pounding into her thin fingers as their grasping hands became one. As a tiny sliver of the sun appeared over the horizon and they drifted in and out of sleep, she confessed her love into someone’s shoulder and someone proclaimed a requited love into her scalp. They fell into a deep slumber, a wall of grass no longer separating the pair.
When she awoke, her face was not resting upon a shoulder, and when she craned her neck she did not see a chin resting in her unkempt hair. Someone’s dreaming face was not smiling down at her and the haughty sun burned the love from her skin.
She never wished to see the stars again, or to hold another hand in a desperate search for companionship. She never waited for someone to return to her; she left for the city that same day. As she looked into the young man’s grey eyes, she was grateful that she had loved someone if only until dawn, and she knew he had never felt the same.
“I’m not upset,” she replied at last, a smile spreading across her face. “I’d never let you make me angry. Don’t worry about it.”
His eyes widened, startled at her fluctuating attitude. Her capricious behavior troubled him, as he was not used to being wrong. “That’s good. Maybe someday you’ll come outside to explore with me. Walking aimlessly isn’t much fun when you’re alone.”
She took a step toward him, noticing a flicker in a confused grey eye. “Judging by tonight’s events, I bet this’ll be a strange friendship.” She took another step, paralyzing him with her placid stare as they stood in the moonlight. “What’s it like out there?”
“Out in the open? Well, it’s dirty and hostile, but at night it’s pretty nice,” he said, staring out the window. A home across the street went dark, as the city population wandered into the subconscious. “How long has it been since you’ve gone out there?”
“I spend my days and nights in here. I don’t sleep, but I dream. I don’t need to see a dirty and hostile world, when I am fully aware that I live in it,” she said, watching the flickers flare up and burn out in quick succession. She turned to face the open window.
“What are you doing?” he asked, grabbing her hand as she surmounted the windowsill. Maybe someday he would love, but it was not coursing through his veins as he latched on. Her dress danced through the room, kissing the air one last time.
The abyss beguiled her as she sat upon the rail of the fire escape. “I’m going out. Are you ready to see the stars?” His flaming eyes watched her dive into the gentle sky.