Outside the Window

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in March 2004


In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found, I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :)


As I write now there is a rainbow, no, TWO clear rainbows, the larger one above the other, stretching across the whole expanse of the sky. It is rare that the weather is cool enough to work outdoors. The sight is so incredible, I want to shake everybody around me to make sure they don’t miss it. “Look,” I point out to a one-year old boy practicing how to walk, “do you see that in the sky?” He flashes a toothless grin that says I’m the last one to know.

Funny how rainbows fascinate me more now that I’m older, as if I can hardly believe something so amazingly larger-than-life still exists.

When we were children, rainbows were as real as Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony, which we could always count on to appear on Saturday morning TV and in our dreams. They were great cause for delight, but nothing stranger than clouds, or stars, or a flower blooming after the rain. Just as we didn’t ask where Rainbow Brite got her rainbow powers, we didn’t lose sleep wondering how rainbows got so beautiful. They just WERE.

And then we started to grow older, and “real” meant the grades on our report card, then the thumbs up or down of people who decided which pair of pants was cool and un-cool, then the figure on our paycheck and the bills that wouldn’t be ignored. Real became everything we had to struggle hard for to acquire.

Real is the building we work in, the bed we sleep in, that car we need to avoid hitting on the street, the grocery store we buy our food from every week. Everything else is an insignificant haze. Real is the remnant of our shrinking world.

It’s high time for re-expansion when we start gawking at rainbows, incredulous that they can appear at will on this side of the screen, beyond the cartoon channel on our ultra-real TVs.

Often it’s just a matter of looking out the window. One that gives you a view of a world much larger than yours. A real window where light can enter and warm the room, and you realize that yes, the planet you’re on is still one of many that revolve around the sun, in a galaxy floating in an ocean of galaxies.

A literal window where you can watch the moon come and go, and people and cats and birds go about their business as if you didn’t exist and, at the same time, as if you were part of all of it, of everything in the universe that has ever existed.

In the place where I live now, the view from the window is a wall and another house, and if I crane my neck high enough, also a little piece of sky. Though the lack of ventilation makes it stifling most days, I’m only there to sleep, anyway; at work, the office is always air-conditioned.

One night, walking home after a late dinner alone, I was startled to find a bright crescent moon hanging low, cradle-like, over my gray neighborhood: the fenced-in houses, the asphalt streets, the leafless acacia tree that once must have given shade to some grass. It looks so real, I thought in wonder, it’s almost like a backdrop for a play.

And as I went back inside the walls of the familiar concrete house, I felt so sad, I couldn’t breathe.