clarity
I ask the barber what he would be if he was not a barber. Our gazes come together in the mirror. He says he wants to be a forest. A what? “A florist.” Oh! I thought you said a forest! He laughs, then pauses, rests one hand on my shoulder—he is remembering something. “When I was a child,” he says, “I wanted to be a window.”
the glass child
A small boy—maybe six, or seven—waves bye to the girl on the platform. He takes his mother’s hand and sits down. The doors close—swoosh. He swings his legs. The train starts, stutters, stalls. What’s the hold-up? He turns to his mother for an explanation, but she’s busy with her phone. Turns to me, but I’m a stranger. Turns to the window. Presses his palms against the glass and whispers “look at me . . . look at me.” The girl is still there, turning away now.
rotations
M’s house in the old mattress factory. The window’s been smashed. There are two glass triangles on the floor and the breeze is coming through. M is moving back to Melbourne in the winter—what the hell are they going to do with all this furniture? The housemate arrives, makes small talk. Picks up a triangle and tries to fit it back into the pane. “Turn it,” we say. “The other way.” To no avail. It doesn’t seem to fit there anymore.
triangulation
On the subway home I google the word PALINOPSIA, but the tunnel cuts the internet. I rest my gaze on the window. On the other side, there are the slate shades of the underground, interspersed with hot fluorescent flashes. On this side, there is my superimposed image, trembling, flashing, cutting out. Ever since the barbershop, I have been thinking about windows and noticing them everywhere. I suppose they have always been everywhere, but it is only now that I’m thinking and noticing. The train pulls up. The internet returns with an answer: the abnormal recurrence or persistence of an image in time.
breeze
My friend M, with their coke-bottle glasses and face like an apple. They tell me they’re going to start calling people ‘cricket,’ the way some people say ‘babe’ or ‘darling.’ The idea came to them in a dream. Ideas seem to come so clearly to them. They are an ‘ideas person.’ Sometimes, when I catch M lost in thought, I am tempted to take a photo, but I know this would make them turn away.
idea
Four Star Diner in Union City. I tell M I have an idea for a book. A book made out of windows—short, square scenes, with little bolded frames, and some reflections. I’m not sure what the windows mean. Only that I want to write them and that the meaning will come when it’s ready. M wants to help. They touch the nearest window and say “what does this mean to you?” The glass is covered in a fine film of dust that reflects our outlines back at us.
reflection
The night we met. I was inside the pub, and M was outside, entertaining a small cluster of other undergrads. They were smoking a cigarette, and cigarettes were cool at the time, which meant M was cool by extension. The undergrads were leaning forward, nodding. I was standing on the other side of the door, thinking: look at me . . . look at me. The air was clear, the sky purple. The bell chirruped when they walked inside.
first impression
M and I have been doing impressions of people we know. Here is M’s impression of me: [palms wide, outturned, sweeping side-to-side]. My impression of M: [I click my fingers, and a lightbulb appears above my head.]
smoke and mirrors
Same street, different night. I was stuck in conversation with some guy. His name was O and he talked in circles. He ate in eight-hour windows between one and nine p.m. The two of us looked kind of similar, and we had many of the same problems (adolescence; anorexia), but he was putting them to practical use. His insomnia, for instance, was a life-hack. “If you keep up that monophasic sleep cycle, you’ll waste a third of your life in bed.” There were purple dents around his eyes. M came over to rescue me and then the two of them kind of glued together. They stayed that way for over a year—M drifted off into his life, I into mine. And every now and then I would lift the curtain to see what they were up to. O was writing dull, puzzling captions about musculature and intermittent fasting. And I suppose I was jealous. He had my old friend’s new attention. He looked handsome in the photos. Cheekbones that could cut through glass.
cut
At the diner, I tell M about what the barber said. How he wanted to be a window. How he said it in a small voice, like a secret. M thinks this is beautiful, that a child could value glass: a sign of truth, and honesty. But I think it is terrible! That a child would want to make himself invisible! It’s an early sign of depression—the metaphor is so clear to me. Not so for M, who insists on beauty.
mud
When I write my book of windows, I want to leave all the scenes open, so the wind can blow through. At the same time, I want to explain things. I want to explain those years when M and I were invisible to each other. When M disappeared into their relationship with O, and I disappeared into my work—I was a fashion model, for a boutique agency in the city—and now we never talk about it, that period of our lives—one day we started referring to M’s relationship and my work in the past tense and that was that.
past tense
When I was a fashion model, my work involved windows, mirrors, and cameras: the cardinal scenes of subjecthood. These scenes set what Lacan calls ‘the mirror stage’: that moment in which a person recognises themselves in an image, which is the moment they are born as a subject. That any mirror, any photo, might be a birthplace. What I am saying is that, as a fashion model, I can be reborn hundreds, if not thousands of times a day.
recurring flashes
And I’ll admit I did feel like a baby. Hands helping my head through the collar. Stylists cradling my face in their hands, and cooing. Middle-aged men who called me “baby.” Instructions on how to eat. I could call someone over to rub my eyes for me, and stars fizzled behind the lids. “Beautiful.” The furrowed brows of famous photographers. “Look at me . . . stop thinking.” Recurring flashes. Walking home with holes in my vision.
eye
A short etymology of windows. Window: the wind’s -ow, its Latin ‘eye.’ Easy to endow it with spirituality (to be watched by an omnipresent force), and it is true that windows are everywhere. Walk down an average block in New York and you’re passing beneath a hundred, maybe two hundred windows. When I moved to the city, I stood behind one of those windows, thirty stories up, and watched the people pass beneath me. Did they feel my gaze land upon them? Did they leave little bits of their spirits stuck against the pane?
spirit
A short history of windows. The earliest ones were aimed straight up at god. They were uncovered holes in the roofs that let light in from up above. With holes came wind and rain, so everyone covered them with animal hides, then paper, then marbles and glass. Glass stuck, because it was invisible, and the best windows could approximate those early, uncovered holes.
pocket-hole
I had no interest in fashion, but it was easy work. I just kind of stood there. I was paid by the hour. Some days they let me sit in the corner and read. One day the director forgot I was there and sent me home at midnight with a cheque for two thousand dollars. Whenever I talked to M about work, I exaggerated the numbers so they wouldn’t think I was vapid. “I’m only in it for the money”—not true. I loved being looked at. Of course O saw right through me: I was the wrong kind of narcissist. I wasn’t contributing anything. Every moment M spent with me was wasted. O stopped inviting me around, and I started seeing less of M. Whatever. I was busy anyway.
the mirror stage
Fashion week, five a.m. Standing in the hotel bathroom in my insect’s body. I wasn’t as bad as the ones who puked canapes and stuffed themselves on cotton-balls, but there was definitely something going on—I put my hands on either side of the sink and leaned forward and looked and looked. I could write that the person in the mirror was a stranger, but that would be cliché, and besides, there’s nothing strange about it—I did it to myself. I was paid handsomely. People insisted on beauty. There were these small, tear-shaped depressions between my ribs—an early sign.
sink
Upon reflection, there was something strange about that mirror in the hotel bathroom. It had a kink in the surface, which gave the appearance of a sunken chest. I looked and looked and couldn’t tell if there was something wrong with my eyes. I looked at all those sick teenagers wandering in and out of the stalls behind me. I remember thinking let’s all cut our losses and go into recovery. But it was a trap. Recovering meant paying handsome sums to get healthy, and getting healthy meant giving up our source of handsome sums—better to keep on losing.
loop
It was my year of infinite regress. My selfhood shrinking down between body and my capital. In each photo, I was a slightly different person. As though I had been born from million different zygotes, and become a million different people, and was now trying to trace the subtle, almost imperceptible differences between my selves. I opened a magazine and saw my face in it—at least, I saw the top half of my face, because somebody else’s mouth had been photoshopped over mine. My self was somewhere between the false mouth and the real face—but where was I, exactly? Who was I?
who are we?
If we want a beautiful answer, we could turn to the impressionists. “We are the windows through which impressions pass,” she says. But now we are getting carried away with metaphors. So we turn to the scientist, who says “we are just bodies in space.” Which is hard to argue with. Even the impressionists concede to it eventually. (As Paul Cezanne grew older, writes Merleau-Ponty, “he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of his body.”)
the impressionists
M’s impression of me: they flop their arms around like a balloon man. I describe the impression in an email to my friend in Melbourne—“it gives me the slither”—not because of its faults, but because of its accuracy—“how easily M can see through me.” I was expecting him to sympathize, but he instead wrote back in M’s defense. He said that impressions are “a labour of love,” and love is “a way of looking closely at people and things.”
love
Different diner, different year. I was wasting away. I got so wasted that the skin on my hands turned clear—you could see through to the veins. M looked at my ghost face and at the blue between my knuckles. They gestured to the waiter. Burgers! Fries! Thanks! And when the food arrived, I said I wasn’t hungry. M looked at me. I looked at M. M laughed. I laughed! We couldn’t stop laughing.
razor’s edge
Months passed. My tire went flat on the bike path. I wheeled my bike to M’s house, and they broke down when I arrived. Here’s the outline: M told O they were going to shave their head; O said M would be ugly; M said they didn’t care about ugly; O said M was seeking attention; M threatened the barbershop; O threatened self-annihilation. It had been going on all year. All while I’d been ‘busy.’
the vain
I described the situation to one of the older models. She had a beautiful bald head, like an ornament. “I think my friend’s in danger,” I said. She tapped a dust of ash onto the pavement. “Well, yeah,”she said. “Obviously.”
the clear person
“So you’re sure you’re okay,” I said. “Yes,” said M. “Are you?” I nodded. But we could see right through each other.
looking closely
I took so many notes that year. Recorded everything I saw. Now I type ‘window’ into the search bar and open them all back up. The bloodshot windows in the nightclubs. The cataracted windows of the food trucks. The ticketed windows on that inexplicable gold-plated sportscar, the stained-glass windows in that converted mechanic shop that cast new colors on the old smash repair sign. Above a rowdy club, there was a window I always assumed went to a dancefloor, and then, one night, I saw the cozy domesticity inside: a bookcase, a Monet, a mobile for a baby. Why did I feel the need to write all this down? I suppose my life was flashing before my eyes.
smash repair
I was living in fragments. Couldn’t follow a thought through to the end. When M told me about O, I spaced out. They told me to see a doctor. Crickets. I did not want for friendship or conversation. I had very few desires. Just a lank hunger for nothing in particular.
cricket
Then one day M called to say they had broken up with O, and was I home? I went to the sidewalk and waved. They waved. I smiled. They radiated heartbreak. And before I could cross the street, a tandem bike appeared between us, and—get this—there was only one person riding it. The metaphor was so clear to us. I laughed. They laughed! We couldn’t stop laughing.
tandem
I was better, M was better, that was that. My agency folded and I applied for a school in New York and—guess what—M was moving there too. We went to the parks and the diners. We ate bagels and walked the average block. We went twenty or thirty stories up and saw windows of opportunity everywhere.
bright light
Light, airy chatter in Prospect Park with M. Their ideas are coming in at all angles. Idea for an essay: “push the boundaries of psychedelics.” Idea for breaking into the Empire State: “sneak in via the restaurant.” On the rooftop, we gasp. The past is the past! We laugh. M and I have never really talked about it.
about it
‘It’ being the past, and ‘the past’ being time we were invisible to each other. ‘It’ being the disorder, and ‘disorder’ being of their heart, my body, their relationship, my industry. ‘It’ being all the work it takes to pretend something never happened. Sometimes, O appears on my phone screen with his cut-glass face—I zoom in. Sometimes there are recurring flashes in my memory. Of M and I making meals together. Sharing ideas. Insisting on beauty. Of M floating down the stairs with a ghost face: I remember this. Because anorexia is never just self-annihilation—it is like stepping in blue paint. You think you’ve done it to yourself and then you look back at the blue prints you left everywhere. The blue feet of your friends and loved ones stamping paint all the way back home.
cold feet
Late night, early autumn. Windows shutting up and down the street. M and I cross beneath a red light and our gazes come together—we’re remembering something. “We were here before.” Many years ago. This light, that diner. We walk inside and hover near the doorframe. Pretend to look at the menu. When we walk out, we turn red again. “What was it,” I say, “that was so significant . . . about that time . . .” We send sideways glances at each other. We can’t pretend it isn’t there. Our old bodies flash between us, clear as ghosts. Now it is too late to go back. The window’s smashed. “I want to talk about it,” says M. “And I’m going to put it bluntly . . . are you ready?”
blunt object
When we look at each other, it is like looking through panes and panes of glass where each pane represents a whole year of not talking and on the other side of those panes, I see our old faces going blue. I want to say something about how strange it is that all this time has passed. I want to say I’m sorry and that I haven’t forgotten. Look at me. Don’t stop looking. Don’t go back to Melbourne, stay here, I’ll lie in your furniture, I’ll repair your window, I’ll see right through you, I’ll see us through—instead, the glass shatters. I laugh.
—Carly Stone (American Literary Review)