We look in the windows of apartments, rich and middle-class
and imagine lives of ours. Swapping clothes with the woman
lighting candles on her dining table. Cutting my hair
like the woman reading under a lamp in her little library. Drinking wine
that’s not from Aldi with just a few people who fill the entire floor
and chat and enjoy and laugh and have no time to dream because they are in one,
splashed with alternate-coloured lamps shaped in unusual designs.
Then onto the next window and the next.
Watching. Imagining. Hoping. Wasting.
At the next window, we gasp.
A cat stretches by a low window and curls its poofy tail flirtatiously at us,
as we stop to talk to it like we’re drunk. We laugh and wave and Mum says,
“Do you know the way out?” and Aunty says, “We’ll save you”, and Brother says, “Purr”,
and I wait to hear what he says. But he is not there.
And a little ship sinks somewhere, and it gets a little colder.
And I remember his cat and the life he used to tell me about,
where he’d live around here or a little more north.
He was so vivid, everything he told me was clear and convincing and
now I look back to the street of windows thinking I must have missed his.
Or perhaps he is with the woman with the short hair in her library,
or he is fetching ice for the party with the funky lamps.
Perhaps he knows all the people in all the windows and
will visit every single one this evening and
he will not stop at mine because I do not have one.
I look at the cat.
And behind the window, I imagine a life in this area
with this cat and with him in it, and I look at the cat once more
before I am pulled away by an overwhelming desire to walk.
Not run in fear or skip in joy or regretfully shuffle.
Just walk.
Like I did then.
Like I’ve done so many times since.
By Angelina Sokolsky
Feature Image: Unsplash
*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Heartbreak Issue’ (2024)
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