Love crept in through the window silent and unannounced, like a mouse tip-toeing its way along the shadows of a dimly lit room. Or at least, that was the effect that she had been aiming for. What happened instead was a clumsy maneuver that involved stumbling over the roughly hewn wooden sill and landing on the floor of the treehouse in a crumpled heap.
That was the way she made her entrances— it was the same way she had entered my life and it was the same way she greeted me everyday— stumbling, and messy, and beautiful.
She smiled at me, straightening up from where she lay toppled over in a mess of limbs. Gangly frame, olive skin, blue-black hair that caressed her shoulders and back in flowing tangles: a vision.
"Junebird!" she exclaimed, as though it was our first time seeing each other in many days. Every morning was like this, as if it were our first. It was a wonderful way to live.
She came in through the window every time, the one that I had built and sawed the timber for myself, until splinters stuck to my fingertips like needles in a pincushion. I had built this place for us, and I had built a door too, though she didn't like to use it.
"There's no fun in making yourself known in the way that people expect you to," she would say defiantly. So she somersaulted through the window like a hapless little fairy bundled up in giggles, and I would pretend to be surprised by her presence every time.
There were two windows in the treehouse. One that I had built: the one that Love liked to use, and another that had one day appeared without any rhyme or reason: the one that Love avoided at all costs.
Unlike mine, it was sealed over with a sheet of frosted glass, and the hazy images that we saw moving about in it did not match the world that we knew lay on the other side. But the most peculiar thing about the window was the light— a soft golden glow, always humming to us, always illuminating the treehouse even in the dead of night when the air was quiet and pitch black.
"Have you tried looking through the window, Love?" I asked her one day. She avoided my eyes and mumbled under her breath.
"What is there to see?"
I knew the answer, though I didn't say it out loud.
A window of possibilities.
I myself had peered through the glass many times, the visions never the same from one day to the next.
Sometimes I was an artist, sometimes an architect, other times a stay at home mother, bustling around a quaint little home and spooning mush into crying mouths. A faceless man would come slouching through the door, placing a distracted kiss on my cheek.
It was this particular vision that turned my stomach especially, and it was the retelling of it that flipped Love's wide mouth into a downturned crescent, a weighted emotion pulling her features lengthwise down her face.
........
