A window is the only archive most apartments are allowed. The walls get painted. The floor gets a rug. The window keeps the rain, the soot, the faint grease of a forehead leaned there in a January that no longer has a name.
I have lived in rooms whose only view was a brick wall the color of oversteeped tea. I have lived in rooms that pretended to see a river. The honest ones look at other windows. At night those other windows become a kind of television you are too polite to turn off.
The weather indoors
Rain on glass is a sound that makes a room larger. You are suddenly in relation to the outside, which is working harder than you are. The plant on the sill, which has been sulking, looks briefly important.
I used to think a good window was a matter of the view. I think now it is a matter of the sill. A sill is a stage for the small objects that prove someone lives here: matches, a stone from a trip, the book you are not reading but mean to.
When I move I wash the glass, which feels like erasing a draft. The next person will write their own weather on it. That is the contract. We do not keep the rooms. The rooms keep a version of us — a smudge, a hook in the frame, a place where the paint is thinner because someone stood there, looking out, waiting for the light to change.