The Window at Night

During the day a window is a view. At night it becomes a mirror, and the difference changes the whole feeling of a room.

Once it is dark outside and lit within, the glass turns the room back on itself. You see your own lamps doubled in the black, your own reflection moving against the silhouette of the trees you can no longer quite make out. The window stops looking out and starts looking in. A lit room at night is one of the most private places there is, precisely because the dark glass tells you so — you can see yourself in it, and so can no one else.

There is a particular comfort to being warm and lit while the night presses against the pane. It is the oldest pleasure of shelter, older than walls — the fire inside, the dark outside, the thin bright boundary between. Rain helps. So does the small sound of the house settling, the sense of the world having gone quiet and handed the hours over to you.

Sit near it anyway. Pull a chair to the dark window and you will find yourself thinking differently than you do facing into the room. The reflection keeps you company without demanding anything. You can watch yourself not-quite-clearly, the way you might watch a stranger on a train, and something about that soft double image makes it easier to be honest with yourself.

Eventually you turn off the lamp, and the glass goes clear again — the trees return, a streetlight, the moon if you are lucky. The mirror becomes a window once more. But for the hours in between, lit and watched only by your own faint reflection, the room belonged entirely to you and whoever was lucky enough to be in it.