Girl in the window

She was a plumpy girl, curvaceous as other people might say, lying forwards, looking out of the window, at the sea, a sunny day. She was in a simple room, wearing a simple dress, hair down with its curly ends let loose, a picture of an ordinary day for a girl from the coast. You cannot see her face, you are looking at her back, like you’ve just entered her room and there she was, contemplating her own world. This was actually a famous picture, from Salvador Dali, one of his early works, before he went all wacky and trendy, before he went into surrealism. The girl in the picture is his sister, he was only 20 when he painted it.

I was 18 when I got this poster, I lived in Brazil at the time, on the beach. I taped it onto my wall, and sometimes when I was looking out of my window into the sea, I looked at this picture and liked to think of it as a reflection of myself. Then, life changed and I moved away from the beach, away from home, I moved far away from everything I knew, but I took the “Girl in the window” with me. I taped it again onto my wall, and it reminded me of home, of an old me.

Well, my life is a constant cycle, and I move and change like the wind, I moved back to Brazil, lived back on the beach, I was again the girl in the window. But she wasn’t there anymore, the poster was lost somewhere along the way with the girl I used to be, and would like to be again. Years passed and sometimes I looked  at the same spot in my old bedroom, looking for her.

The winds changed again, and I went back to England, stayed at my friend’s house. This friend who was there for me when my life fell apart, and again when I needed her. One day we were in her bedroom getting ready to go out when I looked at the wall and there she was, the girl in the window. I asked my friend where she got it, it was my favorite painting. She smiled and said, “You gave it to me, remember? Just before you left, I really like it too, it reminds me of you.”