Window: My Longest Running Distraction

A one-minute song for a lifetime of staring out the glass.

Trees stand tall on the horizon. Taller still, the closer they stand to where I sit. Across the street, a Thai restaurant called Chaya flickers its neon sign above a plywood-boarded window. Next door: Nails Spa. Cars push through 47th Street in waves, pedestrians playing “Frogger” with traffic. A hedge rustles. A security guard scrolls his phone in a parking lot, looking like he’s guarding nothing at all.

And here I am, stuck in my office chair, staring through the glass.

My eyes stop focusing on any one detail, and my brain unspools old reels of memory. A phrase said in passing. A look. A moment I can’t stop rewinding.

What was it she said to me? The look in her eyes.

I’m gone; rumination taking the wheel while my body stays parked at the window.

This isn’t a new trick. Windows have been my lifelong trapdoor. As a kid (and honestly as an adult still), I’d get caught halfway through putting on my shoes. One laced, the other dangling from my hand, because something outside the window pulled me under.

In grade school, my mom even had me tested for epilepsy. She’d heard that seizures could look like this; long stretches of staring. The doctor called it daydreaming. My mom called it withholding.

“What are you thinking about?” she’d demand when she caught me.

“Uhm, nothing?”

But in her mind, “nothing” meant rejection. To her, silence was betrayal.

Even now, I’ll close blinds just to block temptation. If there’s a window nearby, I’ll fall into it.

And every time I catch myself, Window by They Might Be Giants pops into my head. It’s the antepenultimate track on John Henry, clocking in at a perfect, unsettling sixty seconds.

“Look at all the people in the window

I’m checking out the people in the window

I was uncomfortable

Now I’m uncomfortable…”

Windows in our lives are never just windows.

And maybe that’s the real trick of Window: it’s not about what we’re looking at outside at all. It’s about the mirror effect that happens when you stare out the window long enough that you begin starring inwardly at yourself.

For me, this song is less a quirky deep cut than it is my one-minute anthem. The song says in 60 seconds what I’ve been doing for 40 years; getting lost in thought, feeling both fascinated and uncomfortable at the same time. While I stare, checking out the world in the windows.

Do you dissociate by staring out windows, or do you have another portal?