the other side of the window

Looking out the windows for so long, I decided to make something of it. Camera resting on the tripod, left in odd positions that could not describe what flitters of life it captured, I gathered moments together. N does not ask me why anymore. She knows in a general sense what it will be, what it will always be. E is oblivious, lost in a lego castle where all of her dolls are playing at being Rapunzel, where countless wicked women dole out punishment to Spongebob, Natiri and a dark-skinned Bratz doll named Sasha. 

People are plodding through the snow out there, holding hands out there, honking in traffic, looking at the sky. Soon it will be Valentine's Day. My first one with N. Last year we were far too awkward to mention the day or lend it any significance. I think we joked about it a bit. There was no chocolate or flowers, no hard-won restaurant reservation. I am sure I was alone with E that night, probably making chicken soup or doing laundry. 

Some years ago, I was married on Valentine's Day. It was at the courthouse downtown. It was freezing cold. There were a few friends there to witness things, to give us awkward well-wishes. Everyone else had been estranged. My family had no idea what was going on. I was lost then, more than normal. I had traveled so far down a road of self reliance that I believed I needed almost no one around me. I had my old apartment, the windows littered with pennies that looked out on 1st street. I had my guitars, pots and pans and a closet full of fancy shoes. I had watched the towers crumble from those windows, drinking my morning coffee. I mistook the first plane for some kind of gas explosion, thinking ConEd had really screwed up this time. That's the kind of man I was then - trusting, innocent, incapable of imagining what people are capable of. I began to turn sour. I walked the empty streets as sirens and firetrucks rumbled down Houston. Almost everything annoyed me, disturbed the delicate balance of the solitary life I was leading. 

The details are too complex and bizarre to imagine, but I found myself getting married on Valentine's Day about a year later, not far from that empty wound in the earth where the subway trains had just started working again. There were sunny blotches on the walls, in Russian solnechnei zaichiki, or sunny rabbits.  They are supposed to bring luck. Looking back now, out the windows on the riverside in Moscow it is hard to imagine some things being worse, but I am sure they could have been. 

If I look away from the window, I see N and E. 

I see a flower we bought at Ikea for a few rubles, a tiny bulb in some dry earth. Both of us nervous, we watered it every few days. N laughed out loud at the green shoots pushing their way towards the pale winter light. We made bets about what color the flower would be and E won, knowing it would be purple. The flower sits in front of my desk, perfuming the cold air that drifts towards me. 

I go and buy chocolates and roses. Walking in the street I know I am outside the window now, somehow with warm shoes on and something important to take care of. After the blank pause of last year, it has become a new day, a common one, the day many people share in some personal, shared tradition. 

I will make little chocolate cakes, I decide. I will put blueberries inside them if I can find some.