I look into other people’s windows. I’d like to be delicate about admitting this, but there isn’t a delicate way, so: I look. On the evening walk, at the hour when the light goes and the lamps come on but nobody’s thought to draw the curtains yet. From the car, at a red light, at the second-floor apartment with the good bookshelves. A peeping Tom wants the bedroom. I want the living room — the lamp, the wall color, the painting with the striking frame, whether the television is the altar of the room or hidden away in shame.
What I take isn’t something you could report stolen. A dog, gray at the muzzle, keeping the night’s watch over an empty street. A woman I’ll never meet, standing at her own counter, doing the thing I was about to go home and do. It lasts the length of a footstep or five. Then I’ve passed, and I’ve built her a whole life on the evidence of one painting and a fern, and I’ll never be corrected, which is the wonder and pleasure of it.
It travels with me. In Hanoi the houses go up instead of out — narrow as a wardrobe, five separate lives stacked one above another, and you have to crane to read them. I craned. In a certain kind of Indian apartment block, the whole face of the building burns the same blue-white “tube light”, the light of the waiting room and the exam hall, dozens of identical squares glowing the identical institutional white.
And then, on the fourth floor, one window gold.
Somebody up there had decided against the light everyone else accepted. Bought a lamp. Chose warm over efficient, in a country where the tube light is simply what a ceiling has. I stood in the street for a long time, looking at a stranger’s lampshade, and understood for the first time what I’d been doing on all those walks. I wasn’t imagining lives. I was looking for that window — the one that defied the blue and got gold. In every grid I’ve ever passed: small, stubborn proofs that a person, handed the norm, went and found something better.
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming, standing in that street. You can’t do this to your own house. You’re out on the pavement in the dark, doing the looking, and your own window is behind you — you have no idea, from the inside, which light you’re throwing. Blue or gold. Whether the woman walking past yours slows down.
So I keep walking. Being let in was never the appeal — the fern was doing fine without me, and I had my own counter to get back to. I walk to keep count. There are more gold lamps than the tube lights would have you believe, and I’ve decided that this count is worth keeping.
Pour something. Let the curtains remain open.
—Mo
Someone in my family opts for fragrant plantings to send whiffs of scented air to all passersby. Last month it was lilies, Lemon verbena, and lavender currently. In the height of winter it's vanilla mostly.
Me??? I love the warm amber inviting glow of lamps, golden yellow wall paint and the gentle sway of houseplants over tube lights and gray minimalism.