My window is just above my bed. I can't see the stars but the lights of the city substitute nicely. I wish my bed were higher so I could lay in it and look out the window over the city. This is the one place that I feel on top of the world even though lately my world has been crumbling down. I see the cars going by, some steadily others as though they were racing. and the last remind me of my drum major in high school who used to yell at us for lollygagging. " I imagine they are going to exciting places. Places where they don't worry if their boyfriend is cheating on them or why they can't seem to motivate themselves to do the assigned readings for class. I pretend for them. I make them my social group. I have named the girl who sits on the wall outside dobie Lisa. I think its a nice name. She is always out there to smoke cigarettes, I imagine because her roommate is the type that is anal and can't stand to have the rules bent much less broken. Lisa hates that. That is why she wears shorts 2 sizes to small that make her legs dimple while she is perched atop the wall. I am lonely. When I look out my window I feel like everyone else is too. We are a disjointed people connected by this city, these lights and sounds that are the stuff of civilization. I'm sure someone else is in that blue building with the step-like structure. sitting somewhere looking out, feeling the same as me. I like it when it rains, when the sky is heavy and dark and sad. I wish it would rain here. I have never seen that from my window. I think that I might like to live in a tall building like this later on in life, but I would have to live there alone. Its hard to bask in my emotions while my roommate debates who loves who more with her feminine boyfriend before they discuss what they're going to do for their umpteenth month anniversary. My suitemate fits me better. I feel how she acts, but I can't express myself that way for too many reasons. one very big one being my excessively religious parents. They would flip. No one understands my thoughts. I care so much more about the whys than the what is, but I act the opposite. I wish I could do nothing but read all day. I'd go in the living room in the pappazan or however you spell it chair by the window in there-but it would have to be higher too--to see out the window. That is what connects me, keeps me here, keeps me from floating away. So I would sit there and I would read. I would go all sorts of places and be all sorts of people but my window would be my anchor as I sailed through these many parallel universes. I think my favorite would be in a Jane Austen novel. they're so warm. There's such a sense of how to act without ever having to think. I wish I didn't think. I try to keep myself so busy that I don't, but my mind won't be constrained. Its only controlled by the window, my looking glass sanctuary. Its solitude without loneliness. I feel the most lonely with lots of people. on the south mall at noon, walking to class. So many people with such well put together lives, purposeful strides and slender hips. I watch them. I am behind a tree. I wear long skirts to cover what I wish wasn't there, with my thick dark hair pulled back, tugging on my wrinkled shirt that won't ever stay into place. I am magic though, I have powers. I can be invisible. No one ever knows that I'm there. No one ever knows I'm at my window with its menagerie of colored lights. I don't know about anything anymore. I wish someone would just tell me what I'm supposed to do. that there was some fated order of things. That would be easy to accept, that is why we have religion. It gives you all the whys and leaves you only the what is. but for some of us that won't suffice. No doctrine will halt the whys of my mind, I will always wonder about it if not the things it claims. I'm confused and lonely and at my window. It doesn't make sense. But tomorrow I'll get up and I'll go to class. I'll say hi to all my friends and smile. The weird thing is I'll even enjoy it and be distracted so that I only focus on the what is. I'll watch TV and do homework, and probably even go to a club with the cute guy I can't ever date because he happens to be my untrustworthy boyfriends cousin. (yes there are so many problems). But then I'll go to bed. I'll lie and look out the pane that sensitizes me to my pain, and I'll think about all the whys of my life and how I'll probably never figure them out, just how to distract myself from them.