(Not Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: Something Inside Me Stirs Enough

I saw this little girl the other day and when I took this photograph it felt like stealing. I don't know. Look at her. She's stars and hearts and purple and sparkle.  All the things you can not possibly take.

It reminded me of something I wrote a while ago. A manuscript that lost its way.  The moment you fall in love with something you can not keep.

I wake up in the window, tucked in the corner of the sill, like a house plant you forget to water. The glass has become a pillow, the only place I can actually rest my head and sleep.  My cat curls up on the old blue shed across the way, in someone else's yard, under a canopy of bare trees and electrical wires.  I call him mine but, of course, he isn't.  He belongs to a stranger.  I haven't known him until now, until I stopped attending school, stopped spending afternoons in practice rooms and evenings with Graca as I played and she paced.

But now I see that he is there each day unless it rains.  He is fat, which means he's well-fed by this stranger, and he bunches himself up on the same spot of sun for hours. He has claimed it and I have claimed him.  Something inside me stirs enough to feel as though I've fallen in love. 

I place my hand against the glass, try to feel the winter cold in my palm.  I wonder if he is as numb to the cold as my hand is, how he endures such long hours in frigid temperatures, if the swelling sun is enough to keep him warm.