Windowless

We all stood there, at the bus stop – some of you I know very well, and others I see your faces every single day or every third day or once a month, but you are all still a cyclical number of people, in various coats and colours and hair and stances that I see, on the corner of my street.

Today is different. Ever since Monday, we’ve looked up at that house with trepidation.

The lone, beautifully gutted reminder of the old waterfront. The small, economical brick a golden yellow even teetering on a rusty orange. The windows facing front – no panes, all boarded up cleanly. They are so long and seem like they stretch from the ceiling to the floor of that second floor front of the building. Everything about its structure is not of now – there is care, there is a tallness, reaching so straight into the sky. The neighborhood cats have community board meetings in there, and all of you and I stand there, every morning, dreaming and thinking and examining it. It has no purpose in this modern version of our street. But, it is surrounded by mildly industrial field and parking lot. They used to park old props for movies in that field - a cross country bus, a shot out glass police van, a vintage and rounded ice cream truck – anything you desired. On the other side was the phalanx of yellow school buses – our street was where they came to sleep their nights away.

Now, the parking lot is empty – the school buses gone. There is progress in the air – it’s not shocking. The view from that lone three story house must be magnificent. You always envied those cats that could climb up the vines which, in summer, grew from brown root to green varieties up the sides of the house and the boarded windows. It was the back of the house that held the surprise. The View. Those windows, facing the back street and the water, they didn’t have boards or anything holding them back. They were empty holes looking out into the water, the clouds, the tugboats and steamships and cranes. You, and presumably others, stared up into that view and transported yourself into the driver’s seat of anywhere else you wanted to be. It would always be slightly disappointing when the bus rounded the corner, but off you went with that vista still in your eyesight.

Not since Monday, though. A crew of men has arrived – there is a barrier of boards to protect the surrounding areas, when they throw and toss and kick and knock the bricks down – they are stubborn, and just won’t go that easily. But, it’s coming down. It’s clear to see. Even today, the whole top floor is practically gone. You all stand there, and wonder what will happen to your one sided street, where there was nothing before but empty school buses, lots and sky, at the center of which was this dreaming place. This monument to the individual quality of this place which chose you to be its resident. Everyone seems accepting- some take pictures, some just watch intently. It’s as if each of our year in and year out, daily dreams and thoughts and fears and workings are implanted into each brick face which gets knocked to the ground, without care.

It is most possibly alright to accept this and let them go – it is, though (in fact) jarring, and whatever takes its place, there will be an emptiness without a center, without a fixed star from which to view – one which shows us where to focus our sight onto briskly moving morning clouds and sun. The sky has been let loose, and, other than the rumble of the bus coming from around the corner, you can hear footsteps, light and modern, and you sigh a little more as you ascend the bus’s steps and watch the home you all shared get smaller as it rides away from you.

M. Lucia