Some of our windows didn’t have curtains. Not because we preferred openness

Some of our windows didn’t have curtains. Not because we preferred openness — because we couldn’t afford them.

At night I could see my own reflection, faint and ghostlike, superimposed over the blackness outside. I used to stare at it, waiting for something to move behind it. A deer. A coyote. A stranger. God.

Windows at night are a kind of portal — reflecting and revealing at once.

I think that’s where my sense of the uncanny began: the feeling that the world is larger, darker, stranger than we admit.

Even now, I sometimes prefer an uncurtained window. It feels honest.