Window

A few evenings ago, having been awake since the middle of the previous night, A. spun himself into an exhausted furor and sprinted into a window with his hands outstretched. The single pane of glass that long predated us in this century-old house shattered into jagged shards. R. and I both yelped obscenities. She grabbed him and checked to see whether he had been hurt; we were deeply relieved he had not fallen out the window (it’d be a twenty-ish foot drop, if one presumably softened by unshorn shrubbery) and had only surface scratches (redly threatening but thankfully unsplit). I set about cleaning up the mess and stop-gapping the open gash in our living room’s wall.

A.’s shock swelled into hysteria, triggering E. into terror, which happens when he perceives A.—the gravity of his emotional galaxy—to be not okay. I cut out a ragged pane of clear acrylic from a retired picture frame and went about fixing it into place with packing tape. We had some leftover coils of self-adhesive weatherstripping foam I lined around the edges of the sash. As applied, they didn’t really do anything to insulate—and in fact uselessly peeled away by the following morning—but felt persuasive to me in the moment as a hopeful gesture of protectiveness. All the while A. continued screaming, E. crying, R. trying to calm them both with chocolate chips or cheese puffs, I can’t remember which.

This weak plastic sheath is drafty (though the minimal differential actually reveals its glass ancestor to have been as ineffectual as we’d feared) and crude, but it achieves a basic role: preventing our bodily exposure to outside elements while maintaining our ability to see them. It seals us in without hiding us away as would cardboard or plywood. Our view, though, is different than before. The mediating plastic is bowed and smudged, diagonally cracked, obviously cheap, impure. It exposes the oddities of clarity, frames us in our indoor expectations. Should successful glass obviate itself? An obscurity of being: the deceit of a perfect window would be that you don’t notice it at all. “It’s not a bad thing once or twice a year to be reminded that transparency has its own guises,” urges the design writer Akiko Busch, considering the occasion of swapping in her old home’s storm windows, which she realizes offer a less blue hue than the summer ones with screens. When I look through the acrylic I see a street out of focus, which reminds me, among other wonders, that the world is murky.

Besides, in finding a quick solution, I’d inadvertently stuck the sash to the sill so the thing couldn’t be cracked open to let any air in. This was fine until, a few days after the breakthrough, winds and rain picked up speed. A tornado was on its way. The plastic flap was blown inward, allowing the cold and wet into our house. It needed to be retamed, reaffixed, despite the excitement of having the storm’s kinetic frenzy bless the Lego blocks of our living room. In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard interprets a poem by Henri Michaux as having “aggravated the line of demarcation between outside and inside.” That sentiment swirled around as I used up more tape and pointless foam.

An open door shows a doorway. An open window is a window. A closed window is a window. A window that doesn’t open or close is a window. The hole that lets in air is a window. Getting to see through to the outside without feeling it is an added bonus of being alive over the past millennium or so, when someone solved making glass flat and diaphanous. A broken window is a window; ours is arguably not broken at all. A raw earthly force had blown it in following a raw human force breaking it out. The first window was the opening of a cave to let in the world. The word window comes from Old Norse and means “wind-eye,” a way for an edifice to help me meet the weather. The covering—shutter, curtain, drape, blind, shade—is over the window but not of it. It’s not a window but the eyelid of the wall. When I close the eye I set my house to dreaming. A person, Bachelard says, “is half-open being.”

“It really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right / Where I belong,” sings Paul McCartney in “Fixing a Hole,” which came to mind as I was plugging up the hole where the rain came in. He has said that among the song’s weird web of signifiers (pot-smoking, new home ownership, clamoring fans, a strange studio visitor who claimed to be Jesus Christ, a close friend who never received cowriting credit) it evokes how from time to time he feels the need to fill a black hole in the space around him by creating something new.

Somewhere a circus tamer is putting their head in the mouth of a lion. Above an apartment I no longer occupy, bodies loudly coincide. Inside a mother are pieces of their children’s DNA, which floated into them through the placenta and embedded permanently in their tissue before the child’s body left through the exit. Their blood still flows together, apart. Around the world, homes are reduced to rubble, windows collapsed into nothing or erupted into a horrendous undone everything. Demarcation is ever disturbed. Look how now the sky is framing its own change. Having a hole in the wall is a wild, raw fortune. You can fill it with yourself. A pie on a windowsill, a wax figure below, a light for sad Jane “shining dim but constant through the rain.”

When A. and E. go to their rooms, the one who needs light to sleep has blackout curtains, and the one who needs complete darkness has translucent honeycomb blinds, which we supplemented with adhesive blackout paper until it tore up. It’s too light or dark, and either way their eyes adjust. Behind me now, in the office, the cats keep scratching at the backyard window to ask to come inside, then immediately scratch to go back again into the damp grass. “Formal opposition,” says Bachelard, “is incapable of remaining calm.” May I be a broken window unto you. May you be a broken window unto me. We can agitate each other. We might dissolve the right pane, reframe lives shattered past cracked glass. Night’s coming down, and I am looking for you as the outside view beside me begins to reflect my face.