by James Smart

Created on: October 23, 2008   Last Updated: September 10, 2009

This is the house of the girl in the window. Many years ago and I have been and gone since then. India, Africa, China, Russia, USA, I have been all over, and now I am back in this English town of my childhood. I walked past this house a thousand times, to school, back home, to the youth club, to football practise, I did it all. I think my life has been a pilgrimage which has brought me back to where it began. Why this house, though?

On returning to the UK, tired out and spent out I had nowhere else to settle back down. The place I still called home though I hadn't been back in twenty years was the obvious choice. I moved back in with my parents for a couple of weeks but, to be honest, they did my head in. God love them. So I needed my own place.

The letting agent was enthusiastic about the house, but I was just intrigued. Stood in the lounge I looked towards the window she looked out of day after day and tried to imagine the world she saw out of there. I saw a boy in a school uniform walk along the other side of the street, thern he walked back in the other direction, then he was wearing jeans and a bomber jacket, then a tracksuit and carrying a sports hold-all... clouds rolled and twisted through the sky like sped-up film footage, and a housing estate was built before my eyes.

"Good access to local utilities!" I gave a start, the agent was beaming at me. A short man eager to please. He needs to find himself, I though to myself. But I haven't. Back where I began and having lost myself somewhere the other side of the world. I wondered about the girl. Did she ever do anything? She was like a passive prisoner watching the world. Or was she just watching me? After all, nobody else ever mentioned her! The girl who never went to school, the child who had no friends. Maybe she had lots of friends, maybe she was home-schooled? What did I know?

I was shown upstairs to the bedrooms. Three. The master bedroom, second, and a third box room. This was her room. I was sure of this though had no factual basis for it. Clearly the whole house had been decorated at least a few times over the years, but this room had something which no amount of aesthetic touching up could do. There was pain here. It startled me that I could be even slightly intuitive, especially away from the Eastern influences of my travels. Perhaps it was my own pain projected onto even another projection of myself - trapped, all those years ago. Doing what I could to fill a hole in myself. Looking at the world through a window of atlases, National Geographic, yearning to embrace a part of me which was missing.

Outside the house I looked back to the window and I saw the girl. Pretty, enigmatic. She smiled. I remembered that. She new something which I couldn't now back then. I now it now that it's too late.

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