By the window of my apartment I listened attentively to the sound of the wind, of its brush against everything in view, which was the nocturnal edition of all the intimate and familiar things I had seen in the morning. There were lights being emitted from the houses across, in the same paleness as ever; they were either lights from the television screens of neighbors whose lives I had never come across, or dining room lights, which were a bit brighter; really far-off the white LED streetlights of Pullach could also be seen, but from this distance they were mere speckles. They lined up haphazardly and a few would occasionally flicker, indicating perhaps someone had passed by, or a tree branch had shuffled. Between the islands of lights and my apartment window the wind blew, like the march of an invisible legion severing the crowd, while the shadows of trees, the dead cars in the parking garages, and the angled rooftops of houses all sat stationary in the deep, murky sky. Everything put together looked like an oddly manipulated GIF picture - it was looping ever so slightly in trivial places, and all of the colors had been converted to an unsaturated grayscale from their daytime versions, aside from the few spots of lights, which were sparse and almost distracting. From this picture no story could be extracted, not even cursive ones. If the world were a fantasy novel, certainly the protagonist would not be living in this part of it. However, I liked it, not because my wishfulness had yet again assigned meaning to where there was none, but because when I was exhausted or when my pursuits were aground it was in the very dullness of what was beyond this window where I could find accommodation. There had been a limit on how interesting, accomplished, varied, sexually prolific, socially accepted, intellectually stimulating, politically and financially adept my life could be. Placed in the context of the population of this planet or the window of existence of this human civilization, my individual being was but one of the many, just like the unknown souls in the many houses with their lights on, who would probably remain not only unknown but also fundamentally commonplace, and who, by turning on the lights as they had always been doing from one day to another day amidst the winds which had been blowing for one year to another year, had offered another soul, who was equally unknown to them and just as commonplace, some accommodation. Not comfort, solace, hope, empathy, or optimism but accommodation, and very plain accommodation indeed. But accommodated was I.
Strained for having been standing for too long, I decided to take a couple of steps back for the bag of M&M's chocolates in the fridge and grabbed a handful. Each of these chocolates had supposedly different colors, which were anyways difficult to tell under the faint lights. By the time I walked back to the window, the chocolates had been assimilated into the same grayscale extended by all the other things. I quietly went through them as I looked out of the window one last time this evening, where the wind kept blowing.
