Life through Windows

Snow walking. It’s a calming, meditative activity, and at these times in life I’m grateful for quiet winter hikes with cushioned air and subtle beauty that feels like a buffer to my heart. Winter isn’t an easy season, on many levels. Choosing a seasonal career that ends right about when bills rise and holiday expectations are high- 

But that’s not important to me. Let’s just segue into where my thoughts have been. 

I just finished a popular mystery book- I was sucked in, and, due to my current state of mind internalized the main character’s actions and emotions more than I would during other times in my life. She was a miserable mess, dragging weight of an unhealed marital wound around, and glimpsing into others’ lives from her passenger perspective on a train. She imagined picturesque lives from the seconds-long glimpses she got, and placed perfect dreams into their imperfect lives. 

In the end, she realized those frames she enhanced were actually glimpses at the off-moments of a nightmare. The knights and damsels were actually villains and victims. Her own depression started by a villain-crowned-prince in her selective memories and gaslighting he performed on her. In the end- her real state was much better off than her imagined stars in a picturesque fairy tale, and she- the seemingly obvious loser- through fortunate glimpses and timing, and then her pursuit of the truth, brought justice and realities forward. 

I recall all this for you because I relate to her- not the unlikely heroine in a murder mystery, but the sad mess of a person carrying around emotional pain of circumstances that aren’t necessarily all that bad. The life she dreamed of- that she lost- was one with a psychotic killer- yet she believed all the false evil about herself he whispered in her ear. And while it never quite rang true- she broke under the weight of guilt that was never hers to carry. Thankfully her internal voice overpowered the whispers of false reality, but for a long time, she was yoked with what another told her she was, and equally crushed by the perfect lives she perceived others had through her self-tinted view into their lives. 

While reading, I would at times be thankful I wasn’t quite the

mess she was, drunken, jobless, and hopeless- but I recognized the whispers of shame and guilt she allowed to become narrators in her life. The desire to insert herself into what appeared to be bliss. To help right a wrong in another’s mostly perfect life because hers just wasn’t worth saving. But in the end- theirs was the disaster, carefully hidden. Hers, while by outwardly appearances dank- was easily changeable- she was free of the monsters from without. She just had to clear their voices of influence from her head. 

Last year, at this exact moment, I was walking the snowy woods up north, with someone whose life I had passenger train views into- and imagined it quite delightful. It was, however, an unfinished nightmare, to which I could be of no help, and had to sever myself. Today I walk the woods alone. Fighting whispers that angle to become narrators. As I walk, I endeavor to stop looking out windows at lives flashing by, seeing as I choose to see and misunderstanding the scenes that occur when trains go silent. Passenger views are skewed and biased. I set the stage with my own emotions, imagine outcomes based on my own expectations, and in the end, any insertion is but an unneeded intruder complicating a scene not meant for me. My view is turned inward, and upward, where my heart is beating, my hands are reaching, and the stage is mine for setting. Vignettes are just that, fleeting scenes we impose our own context upon, with consequences tied to how long we gaze there.