Читать книгу A Thunderous Silence. Raising an Autistic child. My True Story - Anna Visloukh - Страница 2

I often try on other people’s lives. I like to look through the windows. Through other people’s windows. When I sit in a bus travelling through the city in the evening, my eyes follow every window glowing in the dark. What kind of people live there, I wonder, and I come up with stories about them. Just now, a shadow flashes in a window, and I already know that she is a single woman and she has come to draw the curtains. She will now take off her slippers and make herself comfortable in her armchair. She will drink hot tea and read her favorite book. Or perhaps she will watch a movie. An old one, from the Soviet era, or maybe a Hollywood one made before the war. Her apartment is so cozy and quiet as though angels themselves were flying under the ceilings. So what if she is single, who cares? Personally, I envy her…

Oh, Lord, what am I talking about? What if a real lonely woman, who’s cried into her pillow many a night, heard me now! No, I am not being ironic, I am hiding behind these stories. And it’s not their lives I am fantasizing about – it is my own one, so that for a short time, for the few seconds when I see someone’s silhouette there in a window, I could live this invented life so different from mine. I am drifting in the darkness like an ice floe that’s broken away from the mainland. And now someone else’s life is moving away from me, to the other coast…

I also like houses. Not high-rise anthills, but old near-sighted cabins out in the forest. Can you imagine how quiet it would be there? Only the cat purring loudly, and the firewood crackling in the stove. And no struggles at all! Oh please, just let me go there, for a couple of days! But who am I begging? I would never leave, even if I could… It’s just a dream, and that’s all there is to it. Here is the window of our apartment. It is lit up. They are waiting for me there: my husband, my daughter, and my son.