You and I sit behind the front window, looking out, the window cracked just enough so that the breeze rolls in, but it’s cool, carrying a crispness that feels less of impending summer and far more of a forgotten winter unhappy its time is up. Guess no one’s satisfied when it comes their time. Maybe we should see people more as seasons, having run their course, ready for whatever is next. But seasons we know will return in a few months. People, we can’t be so certain. And loss is always made heavier and for the worse, when you settle upon that painful realization that no, they do not return, you will go through life and you will never talk to them again, never come to them for advice or a Sunday dinner, never…

I’m not real.

You wonder about reality, what’s known and seen and experienced when you sit and watch and report on what’s observed. A plane of glass separates me from my complex, them like animals in a zoo, the aliens of Tralfamadore, going about their days. I, on the other side, looking to document and study -

that’ll be my new thing, I think. Could be fun, watch their ways, see their patterns and routines. Getting to know someone without truly seeing inside their home, just seeing them come and go. I wonder what will come of it.

And if they should see me, I’ll be a face in the glass, little more than a matrix of the reflected pink dogwoods outside, flowering and blooming and sending their blossoms to the ground, trampled on but still cheerful and smelling so good above. Maybe they’ll smile and wave or look away, maybe I’ll wave and smile back.

And then I’ll write about it on here, my words for you to see, sending out updates on social networking websites to places around the world now (hello New Zealand and Puerto Rico!), I’ll become only thoughts and ideas and abstract background stories, the voice of the comings and goings, a girl in solitude.

I’m not real.

I’m a medium. I’m reporting feelings from beyond me, events outside my window, and I’m inside, secure from it all, a face on an icon with a timid smile and a brief bio. But maybe there’s meaning here, maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s something greater, insightful, meaningful beyond me, through what I say, some realization reached through abstraction, where you the reader and I the watcher come together through my words as fellow friends, fellow human beings,

Fellow watchers.

You watch me as I watch them, and in between it all perhaps a spark. And when they’re not coming or going or driving through the sun or the scattered, here-now-gone-again storms, I’ll watch the Dogwoods rain outside my window and look for faces in their blossoms.