Sorry, i’ve been having a life.

My view has varied throughout my life, as i never can see the same thing out of my bedroom windows from place to place. As a child it was just the desolation of SouthWest Philadelphia with a hint of the city skyline buried off in the distance, and then it was a calm schoolyard with its swings and endless ranks of row-homes beyond. It was a shock to go from such typical views to Freshmen year, where i could see a postcard version of our entire city skyline from the window above my bed.


Kenny and i had an ongoing joke that year about how i would invite girls up to the room and ask them if they wanted to “see the view.” Of course, they’d have to climb right onto my bed to see what i meant, which played right into my plan of seduction via the illumination of the city lights.

No one ever took me up on the offer of the view, but it might have been because i never really offered it seriously; always packaging it with the joke that it was, in fact, my surefire means of seduction — which tends to diffuse the seductive power of the plan.


Right now it is raining. My neighbor has his blinds closed, so all there is to see is the oblong diamond overlay of his mottled brown siding, and the strange rust-orange of the next house with cabinets backed up against its windows so that all i can see is what’s on top of them. Stricly speaking, it’s the most restricted view i’ve ever had … even last year’s view of rowhomes sometimes came through with something a little more noteworthy. So, my window isn’t much to be proud of . . . except, between here and those houses on the other side, there is a tiny backyard world that is separate from the people in the houses that surround it. Staring out into it is like watching the interior of a snow-globe, only it is the outside and we are the in, and we are staring out at it through the protection of my tiny back window.

Right now it is raining, and the patter-splash-patter of it on the world below my window is easy to pick out from the street sounds and the sighing of my heater. On Monday all that was out there was sun, and in the afternoon it had reached its zenith and was headed home to sleep as its light was projected down through that tiny window.

My bed was magnified; all warmth and comfort. And, i’m thinking… it might not be the most impressive view that i’ve ever had, but it could be my favourite.