Photo: Inbar Asif
“They’re all old,” the guide gestured, “but some are worse off than others, for they are windowed.”
“Age does not make a building old,” he explained. “Even if sooner or later years form spider webs of fine cracks on every wall, those are just realities built by time. The product of life.”
“But these ones,” his hand rose in half-salute, half-point toward a row of especially dilapidated shutters, “they are windowed.”
When our faces must have told him we still hadn’t the story he’d wanted be told, he sighed and took pity on us. So privileged we had to be to not have lived what would have let us understand the depth of meaning in his words.
“Rooms empty of everything but ruined dreams. Windows widowed of hope. Houses like these go beyond broken relics. Some had gone so long bereft of young ones to gaze through their portals in a waking dream, that short of a miracle to breathe life back into them, they are windowed: dried to the bone of sound, stripped of souls, ready to fall.”
For V.J.’s Weekly Challenge: Windows
Na'ama Yehuda 
I have never heard this expression before – how tragic. The photo really adds to the tale.
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Well, to be honest, I hadn’t heard this expression before, either … 😉 (i.e. my soul had made it up, in reaction to abandoned homes and ruins and the realities that every house needs someone to look out its windows, to feel like it belonged …).
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Your description is certainly effective.
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🙂 Thank you!
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You’re welcome
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This is beautiful. Wherever this comes from, it’s your muse.
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🙂 Thank you! And thank you for commenting! Yay to muse! 🙂 Na’ama
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I really love this, Na’ama. Windowed, the saddest of them all…
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😦 Yes, indeed. Houses crumble when they don’t have anyone to belong to.
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So true… ❤
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xoxo
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Beautifully done. Now you have thinking about this word and it’s meaning.
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Thank you Helene (sorry, accents aren’t cooperative) – aren’t words fantastic beings? 🙂
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Indeed words are to be cherished.
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🙂
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