The Window

She was the single window in the old blue-almost-green house, already a little washed out by time in that monotonous village, where everything seemed to be slowly losing its colour. So she was surprised that her windowsill didn’t get a bit more attention from the people inside the house.

Not that the wooden frame revealed anything particularly exciting... a child kicking a ball, an adult coming back from the bakery with warm bread in the morning, or children playing tag or hide-and-seek in the short stretch between getting home from school and their parents yelling it was time for dinner.

Still, the window felt important. It felt she was there to give glimpses of the world to the sleepy people who lived in that house, already half-eaten by the village’s barren time. But not only that — the window was also there to give hope to the only child in that home, living with a quiet, worn-out elderly couple who no longer dared to look out beyond the thresholds of the window frame.

The girl did. She leaned on it, watching with envy as the other children played freely on the side-walk and in the street — sometimes running and laughing, dodging the rare cars that passed through, sometimes lost in their singing games or jumping rope.

The grandfather, sometimes annoyed, would aim buckets of cold water out through the window toward the noisy group just outside. The window, in those moments, shrugged. It wasn’t her job to define the purpose of that gap between her frames.

But the window would lose all sense of her inanimate duties when it came to the girl.

The child’s favourite time to lean at the window was when the storms came. To her they were a mystery — both frightening and magnetic.

It seemed almost impossible that something so magical and unusual could happen in that forgotten village, where even the walls looked like they were being erased by time. Trucks passed through, maybe stopped at the sad little gas station up on the national road — but only if they were low on fuel.

Whenever the storm found its way to the village, the girl stayed on the windowsill — small body nearly slipping out, eyes wide open.

She breathed in deeply the smell of wet earth rich with the scented compost of the cacao farms around, reacting to the massive drops of rain falling from the sky as if they too wanted to join the children playing on the pavement.

Her senses came alive. The booming, terrifying sounds of thunder split the sky into bright, jagged pieces, drawing powerful shapes.

In those moments, she forgot about the wounded body that held her in.

Her heart no longer bled with longing. She listened, smelled, and even tasted — tongue outstretched — the sharp, earthy sweetness of the storm. Her skin tingled.

The storm’s raw, urgent call pulled her into her forgotten little body — one of the rare occasions she felt grounded, even if she couldn’t yet name it.

She barely heard her grandmother’s voice, calling out in worry: “Girl, get back in before lightning gets you!”

That was the sacred moment where fear found no place in the girl’s heart. And the window applauded her defiance.

When the grandmother, anxious, dragged the child back inside, the window shared the girl’s frustration while she felt her own latch being handled to seal the house off from the miracle happening outside.

The storm brought wildness. But dusk brought something else.

The moment the window most completely forgot her “window duties” was at dusk, when the girl leaned into it, her eyes slowly scanning the village’s main road — right, then left. You could almost feel the heavy beat of her heart with each rare car that passed down that road.

In those times the window almost wished to become, like the storm, a magical passage. A portal that could carry the girl to the place where she would finally see the one who so rarely returned — a presence made of absence, who seemed to fade from memory faster than the crumbling walls of the old house.

The window liked to imagine she would be bewitched just in time — just before the girl stopped believing. Before her eyes stopped searching. Before her heart went quiet, as if it had heard a truth too heavy to keep hoping.

And though the girl’s search slowly faded into extinction, and the window was, in time, retired and discarded — replaced by a shiny modern version with bars that would never again let the child lean there in her favourite spot...

The storm never failed her.

The storm never stopped finding her.

Wherever she was.

Even without a window