Windows

The blinds in my living room have been pulled up for a few weeks now. I opened them to let the sun in, and the rule of entropy of my apartment dictates that when an action is performed upon any object in the apartment, it will not be changed for at least a week. If you leave the sugar canister open on the counter, no one will close it. If a poster falls off the wall, it will stay on the floor, blue sticky-tack up to catch the dust that drifts off the vacuum cleaner sitting in the hall from that time I vacuumed last month.
So when I opened the blinds to let in the light one fall afternoon, they stayed open. We never notice the window, anyway. During the day, it's like a Harry Potter painting; the trees move and the neighbors' dogs pass by, but to us it's just a colorful decoration on the wall, to stare at during deep conversations or when the TV is getting boring. At night it's a dull black square on the wall and an extra mirror. I forget that that thing on our wall is an opening into the outside world.
Other people forget that, too, I think, and I like to glance into the windows at night. I'm not watching, not even looking, really. Not hoping to see anything. There is a row of windows next to the sidewalk that leads into David dorm. I was always glad that I didn't live in one of the rooms that belong to those windows, because if you do, it means that there are just two panes of glass and three feet of air between your life and anyone who takes that sidewalk back to her room at night. I always used to look, though, when I was the person walking back. Tiny things catch your eye. The color of a brushstroke on a painting on the wall. The persistent tapping of a girl's hand on her computer mouse. The angle at which her boyfriend leans in the door to say good-bye.
I've heard it said that a lived life can be a poem, and I think it might be true, but life seems too big for that. Maybe at the end of it you can step back and look and see something whole. Maybe then you could condense it into words or into colors and make a poem or make a painting (because at their best they are the same). But in the middle of it, the most you can do is catch on to snapshot moments through windows. So I leave mine open.