View from the Window

Part of the "Write Something Every Day Project"
Prompt: Pick an element of the outside world with which you have a special relationship. It may be a room, an object of furniture, a plant, a space, or an element of a landscape. Write about it. Do not tell us how you feel about it, but choose your words, mostly nouns and verbs, so that we know.

The setting sun is almost visible through my window. Its light hints over the silhouette of the macadamia nut tree that stands black in my view along with the swaying forms of the palm trees, and it's just bright enough to paint the sky with soft strokes of color--soft like the evening, soft like the lullaby that the trees sing to the world. The hammock leaves of the palm trees sway in the breeze as they shush the people tucking into the golden light that pours through the windows of their houses.

I see the city down the mountain flickering with electric starlight against the velvet ocean behind it. Squinting, I can see the lights of cars moving like shooting stars and the distant traffic lights cycle from red to green. It's traffic I can hear, but only in my head, buried by the whispering evening music of my clacking blinds and gentle laughter of the neighbors. Evening in the city brings magic from the cracks. A veil of shadow drapes over everything like a theater curtain, thrilling in the anticipation of what's behind it. There's a music in the negative space, in the void where hurried, harried thoughts mingled together in crowded quarters, smashed and tangled like gum suddenly find the sky. The voices turn upward and fall silent; they let the night sing for them and suddenly there is freedom. Stars hum in their domed stage as the world breaks free and flies upward, and I hear it in a spectrum of light and color from miles away up on the mountain. The city sings in sunset red and evening periwinkle while I stand at the window and listen.

Air comes to me unsoiled now like a high clean note of song that I alone have heard. All things draw themselves toward me for in the evening at my window, I own the world and own it completely. The sky and its infinite gradient and bright Venus peeking out from the iridescent blue all belong to me as though I can reach up into great oblivion and touch it. The rustling trees are mine; the way the air sits like a blue screen over the shadowed yard is mine; the winking city lights and shooting star cars are all mine, just for a moment. Just for a moment, the entirety of everything is captured in the frame of the window, and for a few fleeting minutes, I can touch infinity.