Chapter I - Margarita in the Making

The windows were small and tall. So out of her reach she had to climb up in her bed to open them. The windows themselves did not open to the street or to the sky. The windows faced a corridor that had a special type of brick. She grew up without seeing most of sky. She opened boxes in the meantime. Boxes that contained books. The Book of Life. Recipe books (recipes they never made in the house). The Bible. She soon decided the Bible wasn't for her. She preferred the poetry book her dad had written for her mom. It had a glassy blue cover and golden letters. He wrote in blue. Passionately. 

The bedroom where her brother and her used to sleep was dark and cold. They lived in a big house that hadn't been built in its entirety. The functional and small areas were a kitchen, a garage (turned into a bedroom), a future library (turned into a bedroom), a bathroom, a laundry room and a corridor. As time went by, the future library was used as a master bedroom, but became a living room of sorts. The garage turned into a music room. The small laundry room rested in between the kitchen and the garage. And the kitchen was the gathering area where they mostly worked on their homework and witnessed the phone ringing, the dog barking, their parents arguing. The corridor joined the backyard to the front yard and its entrance led to the exterior kitchen door. 

The laundry room had a big window that faced the corridor. They used to use that window as a shelf for their shoes. Those formative years were lived there. Hoping to finish the house. Hoping to organize the mess. Hoping to have regular windows, in a regular bedroom, in a regular life. No fighting anymore, perhaps? 

And then there were the neighbors. With their tidy little new cars, finished houses, ballet classes, private colleges. The finished pool. The happy summers that were already happening. While she had books and music, the neighbors had security, the sun, the means. 

She will never forget the daughter two houses down. Perfect hair and posture. Her blueprints under her perfect balanced arm. She was going to be an architect. Her bedroom was a dream. Big window facing the street. A ballerina painting or photograph on the wall. Rose pink blushing in the walls, while she slept every night in a bed made of clouds. She, on the other hand, had the mandatory Sunday school and the obligatory solitary piano practice.  Oh how she dreaded those Sunday classes and the end of the year piano auditions that the family never went to see. In the bedroom, the covers rested on frail bed frames and sometimes smelled like mold and gave her asthma attacks.

The ballet classes had come to a halt. She only knew life hurt and it had very small windows. Far from her small hands that liked to be free.