JOURNAL WEEK 8 · EVCC INTRO TO COLLEGE ESSAYS

Window Soul

A film and poem by Brooke Howard

HOW THE POEM ANSWERS THE JOURNAL PROMPT

At the beginning of this quarter, I wrote that success would mean being less afraid of the blank page, getting my ideas into sentences before I worried them into nothing, and developing a stronger voice. I did not expect the answer to arrive as a window. In your final message, you shared WindowSwap—someone else’s sky, tree, and light—and told us, “You did it,” before thanking us for our stories. I kept thinking about that. You were reading. The class was reading. I was reading them too. The first window was the distance I felt between myself and anyone trying to understand me. By the end, the class felt like a room full of windows: each person’s writing gave me a view I could not have reached alone, and sometimes I recognized my own life in it. This poem became a song and then a film, bringing art, design, and healing together in the way I hoped they might when I returned to school. I still overthink. The blank page can still become larger than it is. But I kept coming back. Not perfectly. But enough.

THE POEM

Window Soul

I am the Helen Keller of being seen.
And someone held my hand under the water
and said this.
this is what it’s called.

It’s called: you are here.
It’s called: I read you.
It’s called: the window was always a window.
You just needed someone to stand on the other side of it.
To stay there.
To read.
To not look away.

And on the last day they gave me another window.
Not mine.
Someone else’s sky.
Someone else’s tree.
Someone else’s light coming through just the same.

And said: look.
The world is a beautiful place.
And said: you did it.
And said: thank you.
For your stories.

Which means: they were reading the whole time.
Which means: the dark was lit the whole time.

Which means: I was never as sealed as my hands believed.
The glass was never as thick as my loneliness told me it was.

Poem by Brooke Howard