What we have here is a pickle. You see, I like to think that one day I’ll live in a house with many windows. This is mainly because right now, my place is the total opposite. I’m sharing a house with other students, and because I’m a cheapskate I went for the ‘interior room’. See, this building is a weird shape, like the architect just had the idea for ‘really big’ in his head and made a gigantic splodge of concrete. Really great in terms of proximity to my university, but there’s only one side of the entire apartment that has windows. Two bedrooms get that side, and I’m in the tiny inside room, which is a windowless box.
It’s been three years I’ve been living like that, paying a little less in rent but growing in my acknowledgement that humans NEED sunlight. I’ve started making lists of aluminium window installers Melbourne wide, so that when I get a place, I’m going to deck it out with as many windows as possible. With the state I’m currently in, I think I have about a week or two to go before I start scribbling ‘window replacement’ and ‘sash windows good’ all over the walls in my own blood because it really is maddening in this box.
Fortunately, I have a week to go until I finish my course, after which I’m living with Mum and Dad for a bit, but that’s not exactly much better. They also live in an apartment, on the ground floor, and the view out of my room is another building right outside that blocks all of the sunlight. What I’m saying is that I live in a windowless, sunless world and it’s like something out of a dystopia. Sometimes I just go and lie in the sun in the park, not because I want a tan, but because I’m seriously deficient in light and vitamin D to the point where I’m getting some weird variant of scurvy.
Don’t take for granted your option to shell out for a sash window replacement, Melbourne folks. That’ll be my future home: windows everywhere, letting in ALL the light. I’ll pay extra for giant curtains as well, the one good thing about the box room being its unbeatable privacy.
-Y