Friday diorama

I have a new end-of-week ritual. Friday evening I leave the kids with my hubby, shut the door for my Hour, I prepare my writer’s workshop: the yellow notebook with vintage flowers, pen, a kitchen organizer of multi-colored sticky notes in the shapes fromclassic square to a kettle (I am a maniac of planning, taking notes, reminders in the form of sticky notes and organizers, I have about 16 sets for the moment) all occasions, from planning a working week to an orgy). I open some craft beer miracle with a minimum power of 7.5 volts (this week „Roaring 40”, mega hopped, slightly sweet and strong as I like). I sit in our small room with the lights off on the table by the windowsill – so that I can clearly see the diorama of windows in the opposite block.

Someone is making soup, someone is vacuuming, someone is watching TV, someone is arguing, someone is writing, someone is planning a triple premeditated murder. The meat saleswoman is dancing on a cigarette in the back room, she doesn’t know about my presence in her Moment. Observing them, I am with them, very close, intimate.

I’ve always loved it, since childhood. To look at houses through windows, reassured that the world continues, civilization is still developing in these pots, on sofas and under quilts. That we are safe. It may be the result of growing up in the communist era with the Soviet paranoia of nuclear war caused by the West. Maybe it is Chernobyl, which has always been somewhere in the background, in gossip, whispers, conversations at social events sprinkled with cognac, with the obligatory presence of jerked chicken in jelly served in tiny porcelain cups with green flowers.

I was especially captivated by the evening dioramas of block or dormitory windows. So many families, so many people, so many things, dramas, nightmares, miracles, boredom, ecstasies, thoughts, feelings…. And all in aesthetic and hermetic window frames. No matter what, the frame remained intact. Terrifyingly insensitive, admirable in its consistency. People came and went, I looked enchanted and half an hour and an hour sometimes …

The most terrible thing was when the light went out.

I didn’t know if someone had gone to the other room or died, which I didn’t know about the soup, he hit her a lot or they made up, maybe the chops burnt. Suddenly, I was absolutely terrified.

Or maybe they just turned off the light, settled on the windowsill in the cocoon-enveloping darkness to look at us?