I’m taking a writing class at Gotham – creative writing. Committed to posting the absolute shit I write because I can readily admit (1) I’m not a fiction writer and (2) I already generally suck at the areas I want to be better at.

First piece constraints were it is titled “The Window” and it has to be 500 words or less. Shit was hard!

The Window

By Anjali Sareen

She sits, alone in her home, wondering if she is alive.

What actually makes someone alive? She’s not sure anymore. Presumably, more than just inhaling and exhaling. What she has been doing for the past years has not been living, she knows. Her days are filled with nothing and no one. No conversations. No activities. No feeling. Just a constant state of existing and trying to figure out how to fill her empty time.

She understands, intuitively, that she can’t go on like this. But she also knows that without her, there is no desire left for anything else.

In fact, she’s rather been enjoying the half-life of observer, rather than participant.As observer, she gets to live through screens. Watching other people fully experience humanity. Watching them work and exercise and stress.Most importantly, watching them feel.

She is enjoying her screens. But more, her window.

From the protected perch of her armchair, her window is an unblemished, yet unpolished view into the lives of others. The groups of girls walking home together at 1, barely standing in their heels but laughing so loud it can be heard down five city blocks. The business man, constantly pacing on his phone in front of her apartment building, with the weight of closing multimillion dollar deals visible in the wrinkles on his face. The teenager and his little sister, passing her place around 7am and again around 3pm, she assumes back and forth from school, with extreme tenderness evidenced by the way his attention is focused on nothing but her.

Her window has been a portal to the real world these past years. But more importantly, it is reminiscent of her window. The window she loved in the years before she left – where she could sit for hours at a time watching the squirrels run. Where she would be prepared to howl loudly should she see anyone step on her turf. Where she was both stimulated and protected.

She loved windows her whole life. Some of her favorite moments were spent with her wet nose pressed to the glass, attempting a sniff even if she couldn’t see. And if she could, watching with rapt attention.

It’s impossible not to think of her, when she’s been sitting on the edge of life since she left, experiencing it through the filter of other people and her window. Their windows aren’t the same, though. One keeps her from having to participate fully in the act of being alive, the glass a protective shell. The other, her window, was just a different way of participating in the world, the glass allowing her to feel fully alive with every bark before she got to race outside to explore it all herself.

She wonders if she’ll ever have the desire to race outside again. She sighs heavily, and sinks deeper into the recliner. She should find something to eat; she’s been here for hours today.

No, she thinks, and turns back to the window.