Whispers in the Windowlight

We are told the window is a comfort — that light through glass is protection. A boundary. A blessing.

We are told that reflections are innocent. But. No one asks what happens when the light bends wrong. When glass forgets it is glass and becomes something else. Something hungry.

The first time I saw her, she was in my bedroom window. I live on the sixth floor. No balcony. No ledge. Just the void of air and distance between my eyes and hers. And yet, she was there.

She looked like me. Almost. But not quite. My reflection, if it had teeth. We are told mirrors show the truth, but windows only show the world. This was no mirror. This was not the world. This was my face — corrupted.

At first, I convinced myself it was a dream. The kind that stumbles into your head after a late dinner or a day too full of stress and unanswered texts. I laughed about it the next morning, to no one in particular. But laughter doesn’t make her leave.

By the third night, she started tapping. A gentle click-click, like a fingertip against the glass. No force. No urgency. Just… persistence. Like a metronome trying to find my pulse.

I tried to ignore it. Turned my back.

But the tapping found its way into my thoughts, synchronized with the tiny, guilty heartbeats I thought I had hidden deep down. Click. Beat. Click. Beat.

That’s when I stopped sleeping at night. I thought I’d broken something. Or maybe preserved it — a fragile part of myself that could still choose to not look.

We are told, "don’t feed the shadows attention, they grow fat on it." They grow bold, too. I started sleeping in the mornings, when the light came in full and unfiltered. Curtains open. No darkness.

She never came in the mornings. But sleep, like light, is treacherous. You don’t know you’re crossing a line until it’s behind you. And you’re deeper in the fog than you realized.

I dream in fragments now. Bone splinters and glass shards arranged like memories. Half-smiles on people I can’t name. Rooms that exist, but not in this world.

One dream. Over and over. I’m standing in a hallway that stretches too far, and every window on one side has her face. Not just a face. My face. Dozens. Hundreds. Staring. Smiling too wide, eyes unblinking.

And I hear her say — not aloud, but inside me — “Come closer. Come remember.”

I don’t. But I do. I always do. And I always wake up with blood at the corner of my mouth and the smell of wet glass in my nose. We are told that our dreams are our own.

That’s the lie. The biggest one. Because some dreams don’t belong to us. Some dreams are borrowed — or worse, planted. She doesn't only want me to remember. She wants me to return.

And the worst part is: I think I already did. A long time ago. Maybe when I was seven, maybe in another life. Maybe in a dream I mistook for childhood.

The memory is never whole, but always painful. A light too bright, a scream behind my eyes, the sense that I’ve left something in the reflection and what came back is... almost me.

There are other people like me. I know that now. We find each other at odd hours — those who don’t sleep when the sun sleeps. We talk in code: “You see her too?” or “The windows talk, don’t they?”

Some are worse off. Twitching with the rhythm of the tapping. Pulling their own reflections apart. One man wore a blindfold. Said he hadn’t seen light in six years.

“She follows the gaze,” he whispered. “You give her your eyes, she takes the rest.”

He died three days later. Fell from the 14th floor. No balcony. No ledge. Just glass. And her. Always her. Last week, I slipped. Nothing major. Just an afternoon nap, unplanned. The heat made my head soft and the lullaby of rain against the window lulled me down.

When I woke, the apartment felt wet. Inside. Like I was underwater. And the window? Gone. Or rather, opened. She stood inside this time. My smile on her face.

She touched my shoulder and said, “It’s not so bad. The forgetting. You just stop being tired.” And for one terrible second, I believed her. My body did not. I screamed until the light changed. Until it became real again. She vanished, not like a ghost, but like a shadow when the angle shifts. Now, I keep the windows boarded.

I wear mirrored sunglasses indoors. I speak to no one who smiles too easily. Because I am running out of days. And sleep waits like a patient friend. But I know now: the light does not save you. It illuminates your surrender. And windows? They don’t keep things out. They keep you in.