Much of my early childhood was spent at the front window of my house, waiting for my dad. Every other Friday he would come for his custodial pickup, and every other Friday I would plant my hands and my cheek against the glass and watch the street until his little red Pontiac turned into the driveway. When I saw it I would jump up and announce it loudly to my siblings, not knowing yet that this upset my mother. Eventually I was told to stop, because my little sister, who had a different father, would get excited when my dad arrived, and I was the cause of that excitement. That was when I started to understand the arrangement of things. The family inside my mother’s house, her and my stepfather and my half sister, was the real family, and mine, my dad and my twin and my older sister and me, was something else, something that wasn’t supposed to take up space there. So I kept the hope and the joy and the excitement, but I learned to keep it folded up inside me where it couldn’t bother anyone.
I would watch out his window for the whole drive to his apartment in Beverly Hills. It was a long way from the San Fernando Valley to the heart of Los Angeles, and I didn’t know how to measure time yet, so I measured it in landmarks instead. There was the white columned building I was certain for years was the actual White House. There was the Getty Center looming above the canyon of the 101. There was the Glendale Galleria with its giant G facing the highway, and a wedding venue with fairy lights strung through the trees and lanterns and a grand fountain that always caught my eye. There was a gym built on top of an office building where the glass was see-through, and I would crane to see who was working out up there. There were the mannequins lined along the top of a parking garage, frozen mid-wave to the cars below, and a billboard with a real car bolted to it that I could never figure out how they got up there. On rare lucky days there was the Goodyear blimp, and always, the Hollywood sign. I loved that window. It taught me to love car rides. The only thing I didn’t love was the drive in the other direction, on Sunday, when the same landmarks came past in reverse and each one was no longer a countdown to my father but a countdown back to the valley, and the closer we got the tighter something pulled in my chest.
The view from my bedroom window was a tall Peruvian pepper tree. All the trees outside felt like security to me, and I climbed every one of them, each having a soul, the way people do. The orange tree was young, a peer, and I would climb up into her and hug her branch and watch the neighbor’s backyard for the parrot that lived there, the one they set outside in his cage to take in the sun. The pepper tree was older and wiser, and I would walk slow circles beneath her, breathing in the smell of her berries, listening to the wind move through her leaves. Out my window there was also an orange tabby cat who liked to sit under the tree, and I was so delighted by her that I told my mother, and we set out food and water and called her Tiger Lily. She was the first cat I ever fell in love with.
That same window was the one I dreamed of escaping through, especially when I had gotten into trouble. I would slide the screen off and drop down into the backyard and pace, thinking about jumping the fence and disappearing into the neighborhood, and then I would start to imagine the steps after that, where I would actually go and what I would actually do, and the plan would fall apart in my hands and I would climb back inside and slide the screen carefully into place so that no one would ever know I had tried. I did this from around eight years old until I was twelve, when I was kicked out of the house for the first time and learned for real that wandering the streets in the dark was not the adventure I had imagined it to be.
When I was seven my dad gave me my first iPod and asked what kind of music I wanted on it, and I told him only girl singers, because at that age I genuinely believed only girls could sing, since all the boys I had heard sounded bad to me. He loaded it with around three hundred songs, all women, and I fell completely in love with Kelly Clarkson. I played Breakaway constantly, especially on rainy days, acting out the lyrics like I was starring in my own music video. There was a line about spreading your wings and learning to fly, and I would leap off the couch and flap my arms like a bird and pretend to lift away, and the whole performance always ended the same way, with me at the window, looking out, wishing to break away one day. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to break away to. Looking back, I think I just wanted to grow up.
In high school my OCD reached its worst, though I didn’t understand yet that it was OCD or that it was the source of so much of my distress. I would get intrusive visions of myself doing things that frightened me, and one of them involved a window, and a fall. After that I began avoiding windows, especially on higher floors, and losing them was difficult. The window had always been my one channel to somewhere else, the place I could press my face against when I needed to be anywhere but where I was, and now even that was closed to me. There was nowhere left to look but inward, and so I folded further in on myself, the way I always seem to when there is nowhere else to go.
When I was kicked out for good at eighteen, my plane ride to Pennsylvania was spent in a window seat, and it was surreal to watch the whole landscape of my life change beneath me, a change I had not asked for and did not want. I sat paralyzed and glued to the glass while I was carried away from home. I moved in with my uncle, and the room I was given did not have a window at all, the first room I had ever stayed in without one, an unfinished basement with exposed insulation along the walls. By every measure it was the worst place I had ever lived, and yet it was also the first space that was truly mine, and I loved it, and I decorated it as best I could against the bare beams. I understand now that the window had never been the problem. Pennsylvania itself was a kind of window I refused to look honestly through, everything there softened by a rose-tinted glass. I idolized my uncle and could not see the person he actually was until he began to hurt my aunt, and I helped her get free, and only once she was safe did I let myself escape too, fleeing to Alabama with the person who was about to become my fiancé and is now my ex.
In our first apartment in Alabama we covered the windows in stained-glass stickers, so that I no longer had any view of the outside at all, but at least I could pretend the inside was beautiful. That is the truest thing I can say about that whole relationship. I was isolated from everyone, including my twin, and everything looked good enough on the inside that I never thought to look past it to the real beauty that was out there the entire time. Later, when I finally had my own apartment, I kept the windows open at all times, mostly because I lived in a rough part of town and the building was old and damp and spores grew in everything, and opening the windows was the only way I had to keep the air moving and the rooms breathing.
Now, in my new city, I keep the window open to hear the birds sing. I have a balcony that belongs to me, where I sit and write every morning, and the window has finally become what it was always supposed to be. A place where I can stand and see clearly in both directions, the beauty and the ugliness both, and let myself be positive some mornings and a mess on others, all of it on my own terms. The peace I feel here is a peace I had not felt since I was small, watching out the front window, waiting for that little red car to turn into the driveway.
