Windows

I love the view from the windows in my room. I really do. I do make the occasional complaint about the sun in the mornings, and the habit it has of slanting just so, such that it's always in my eyes as I burrow into my covers, but even that has it's own charm, like my personal alarm clock, except a healthy, warm awakening instead of an electronic scream.

Last night, before I went to bed, I turned off my lights, and was surprised that the light levels hardly changed at all. My room was lit by an orange glow. I looked out my windows and saw that everything before me was awash in that same glow. The snow was falling thick and fast, to use a cliche, and somehow the light from the streetlamps was carrying on the solidity of the air. For you see, when the air is filled with snowflakes, it is almost solid when you behold it. It is as if you look through immense sheets of glass frosted with specks of ice. And the lamps shed their light, uncaring, unknowing that this light was illuminating far more than the street. So I sat in bed, watching the glow, not much else, for my glasses were on the table. For the longest time, I sat there, grasping a pillow, thinking of another pillow, and how the smallest things, unthoughtful, could be of such import to me, could raise my ire so completely that blood oozed from my clenched fist, could discomfit enough to cause my withdrawal. And how inconsequential it was, cast in that eerie orange light.

I woke up this morning, no harsh glare of sunlight today, and looked out the windows to a panorama of pure white. It had been snowing like mad last night, and now, everything has been thoroughly covered up. Even the fountain thing I use to measure the snowfall, by how much of the edge has been covered up, has disappeared under the fluffy ice. As I look out towards the lake, it has vanished. In its place is a plain. A plain covered with snow. It stretches out to the horizon, but no. That would be a misrepresentation. For I cannot see the horizon. The mist, the falling snow, have caused the horizon to be only a memory. I let my eyes drift, starting from the shore of the lake, where trees and streetlamps provide some measure of reference, then slipping up, noticing the strange patterns upon the snow on the lake, as if some intrepid party of explorers has left its tracks. Such Jules Verne fantasies should be far behind me, I know, but they are not. As I venture further up, into the distance, the pure white begins to dominate, overwhelming the tracks, the ice, my vision. I cannot stare for long, for fear of the glare, but I find that I do anyway. And so the sheer whiteness of the scene becomes so dominant, so overwhelming that it seems diminishing to have a horizon break it. And so one does not. I look for it, but find that my focus slides past where it should be, seeing nothing but that all-consuming white, up into the sky, where finally there is some break in the white. I see the gentle patterns of clouds, just barely visible. Even then, I can only see them so nearly directly above me. A little further out, and the monotony returns. It is as if the entire scene before me is melded with a cloud, enormous enough to envelop the world I see. Hyde Park has been torn from the earth and wrapped in a cloud, and what I perceive to be the lake is nothing more than water vapour.

And now, a line of birds wing across the scene, late in their migration. Or perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps I have mistaken snowflakes for birds. I only saw them for the briefest of moments, after all. And the snow continues to fall. I see flakes fly outside the glass. I do not see the dreamy drifting so often described by writers, but a mad whirling, a wild dash across the air, more often climbing rather than falling, their movement more horizontal than vertical. Yet the proof of their downward motion lies everywhere before me.

I think I shall venture out into the cold for a walk.

Have I mentioned that I love my windows?