my love for lighted windows

finding beauty in an ideal

a little fiction, a little truth

One of my favorite things to do while walking in the evening is fantasizing about what’s behind a lighted window. 

There’s something enchanted about them. A certain luminous whisper. Especially in winter months, when the days are short and the nights are cold.

As I stride down the city streets in the twilight, snow falling silently, breath clouding the air, my eyes wander to the passing homes. The golden glow radiating from their windows. The warm light that spills out onto the sidewalk. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of life—muffled voices or soft piano, sparkling lights on a Christmas tree or an oak dresser that looks just like mine. 

I know the people inside probably aren’t circled around a dinner table telling stories about that one trip to California and playing Euchre and laughing. I know they’re not stoking a wood-burning stove and staring into the flickering flames, or wearing their Dad’s old Mountain Equipment Co-op fleece that still smells like him and reclining in a leather chair to read The Iliad, or making a cup of chamomile tea and padding across a patterned Persian rug to tell their partner about their day, or reading their child Jack and the Beanstalk before tucking them into bed. I know. 

But I can imagine. Behind a lighted window, anything could be happening. 

Lighted windows are untold stories.

I can paint a portrait. I can project an image of what I wish would be going on. What I’d be doing if it were me inside, bathed in that warm light instead of out in the chattering cold. 

I can envision an evening that emanates fullness, wholeness, balance.

Each window, my heart aches a little. Like I’m longing for a lost lover. Looking for something I can’t find.

~~~

I never see anyone by the window, basking in a lamp’s tender incandescent glow, looking out into the frosty cold. 

I wish one time I would. 

She would be sitting cross-legged, wrapped in a wool knit shawl, a steaming mug of tea cupped between two hands. She would spot my maroon toque I’ve had since high school. See me walking, bundled up, red-cheeked and shivering and regretting ever wearing jeans ever. And I’d break stride for a moment. And we’d share a knowing glance. 

Then I would go on and she would watch me speed down the sidewalk. 

She’d feel the tug of a smile sneak in. Get up from her window seat and walk into her living room where she’d surprise her husband with a big bear hug and then text her sister to meet at their favorite corner cafe on main street on Saturday and play some music on the stereo she bought in college, remembering how much she loved Mozart.

“Maybe that’s my job on this earth,” I think. “Stand out in the cold to remind people they’re warm”.

~~~

I round the corner back to my apartment. 

The window is dark. 

I trudge up the steps, swing open the door, flick on a light. The cold LEDs feel sterile. Light pooling, coagulating on the stark white countertops, making my kitchen look more like a laboratory.

It’s eerily quiet.

My phone feels heavy in my pocket. The TV in the corner looks miserable and menacing with its blank lifeless mechanical stare. 

There’s a sinking feeling in my chest. 

The image of the lighted window, a moment frozen in time, stuck in my mind. 

~~~

Fullness still evades me like a ghost. I worry I’ll never find it. I worry it’ll always haunt me. 

Not for a lack of wanting, but wanting won’t make it so.

But I’m finding beauty in the flickers. In the lighted windows. In the hope that one day my life will be everything I want it to be. That I can build it with these two hands. 

Besides, there’s a seed of beauty in longing, in waiting. 

I think people discount being on the outside looking in. Instead of basking in Gatsby’s green light—leaning into that lovely, impossible longing—they want to wrap their fingers around the lightbulb. Forgetting that’s not what lights are for.

They shatter the beauty of the ideal by forgetting it’s an ideal. 

Vicarious experience is still experience. It’s how we calibrate our compass.

And imagination directs reality.

I know one day I’ll stop fantasizing about what’s behind the lighted windows I walk past. I won’t even notice them. 

~~~

As lost as I get in the illusory, I must plant my feet firmly on this earth. 

If I’m not deliriously grateful to be alive, then I’m not paying close enough attention.

I’m on the patient path. That is all I can ask for. I know I’ll get there and wish I savored each step a little longer.

I will never be sufficiently grateful for the gifts God has given me. 

So maybe, just maybe, the next walk you go on at night, you’ll see a lighted window and remember just how good your life is. 

At least, I do.

But you can only really see it standing out in the cold. That’s just the way it is.

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Thank you

kora

,

Chris Coffman

and

Jordan Blackwell

for your masterful guidance on this piece.

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