The Window

It’s a window. A perfectly placed window that wasn’t designed to be so perfect. But it was. It just somehow ended up being there. We chose her room for her, because it would be on the ground floor and close enough to everything she could need. Self-sufficient and all. But I wasn’t bothered about that because the house never interested me. She and I are actually quite similar, in the sense that we both love our own space and we’re happy to stay there and not go anywhere else. We build worlds for ourselves and we could only do that because we were allowed to. I think Amma and Appa never thought this would ever happen and thought they could bully us, guilt us and just somehow get us to change that part of us. But no, we just didn’t care and they accepted it and grumbled about it.

I have my room and my window. My bay window. Now there’s tin-foil in front of it but it is there and on sunny days, the light is just perfect to relax and think and feel and just be. Filtered light, light that wanes and light that just feels like it was for me. A little gift from the outside that wanted me to come find it. But I won’t leave. The inside is me and the outside is boring. Not true, never true. It is what it is and I’m too scared of my restrictions to find out. But I’m going to. I will. But that isn’t the point.

Today, I sat there. I sat in her room in the one place I’d never dared or just thought about sitting before; the chair beside the window. She went on with her work and I sat there. I looked out and it hit me how similar we were. Two souls separated by two generations yet the similarities were uncanny. I knew why she sat there. I knew why this room was hers. I knew why she doted on me. We were the only ones who could live together and not be bothered about the world. I looked over to her, saw those hands work their magic just like they had over the years. I thought about her life and the things Amma had told me about her and the life she had led. There was no one else I knew who could relate to my feelings like she could. But I knew I’d never tell her this. We were just like that. We couldn’t, just couldn’t. Similarity had torn us apart in a way that it had brought us together too. We were one, but never the same for the world to see. I turned back and let my mind wander again to the mundane things we think about when the world lets us do so.
 

It’s a strange thing to know you resemble your grandmother so much.