I never never close my window.
At one-thirty-seven in the morning on a Thursday, I am thinking of Peter Pan. When I was small, I wouldn't shut my window. I hoped and prayed and waited for Peter to come and bring me to a place where I would never never have to grow up. somewhere magical where the threats of adulthood and the shadow of responsibility could never never touch me. I left my window open for him to enter into my world, to take me back to his.
I kept my window open through snowstorms and summers and I woke more than once shivering, a blue cloud of breath escaping my lips before a cold Novermber sunrise. My parents complained that I was wasting electricity, the dogs panted a complaint of temperate inaccuracy, my own body protested, my fingers an angry red and my toes vermilion. I didn't pay attention. I was too busy staring past the screen and the weather, waiting for Peter to come and get me.
By the time I was fourteen, I figured that maybe I was too big for Peter to carry. Pixie dust might not work on me. The innocent ignorance that defines youth had already started to fade, and I was grabbing at my childhood as it slipped like smoke through my fingers. But a habit once formed is hard to break, and the smell of night air was a sleep-time perfume for me. Peter Pan was never never coming, but it didn't matter, I kept my window open anyways. A whisper in my ear wheedled that maybe I wasn't too old. Maybe I still had a chance. Growing up was scary.
Now, in the eighteenth October of my life, I know that Peter can't take me away. I've constructed gossamer chains around my wrists and ankles and even if Peter is sitting outside my window with Tinkerbell right now, I won't see him and he knows that he can't get me. Fairy dust only works when you believe, and I'm afraid that scholarships and politics have never never had a place out in the wide expanses of faith. Peter will just have to be content with watching me slip farther and farther away from him, my eyes turned faithfully towards my textbook. The air seeping in my window keeping me awake through all-nighters.
I like to imagine that he was always with me, right under the windowsill, invisible in the shadows, waiting for just the right moment to leap into my bedroom, dressed in green, a pixie flitting by his pointed left ear. He would offer a hand to me, a cocky grin splayed across his face. He always had a taste for theatrics. I guess that the right moment never presented itself, and so I grew up.
It must be hard for him to face this alone. Age is such a distancing thing. I understand this. I wonder if he does. If he doesn't, or if he ever wants to talk about it, I imagine that he'll leap up onto my windowsill, Tinkerbell curiously examining my biology textbook, he'd look awkwardly around and I would offer him my hand. My maternal instinct is telling me that he has something on his mind, maybe it's trouble with Wendy, maybe he's homesick. He can tell me anything, I'll listen to everything, my eyes and my heart are always open to him.
I never never close my window.
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