Open windows

Notes on hope.

Don’t you love it how you can sometimes come across a sentence, a word, and you feel like someone so gets you, so finds you, so saves you?

It was 1pm on a Sunday afternoon in Stone town Zanzibar, when I was walking through Freddie Mercury’s museum. It was an intriguing place from the beginning. A tiny white framed window where you got your ticket, alleys with dim lights, walls a shining black and white and red, photos of smiling faces that when you looked at them you could almost imagine them saying “Finally, you came.”

Freddie Mercury’s voice filled the air, his music playing softly and deep, “we are the champions my friend…” and loud that it makes your feet want to be in sync “we will, we will, rock you…” And at last there it was, a wall that awaited me in the whole of Stone town, a wall of this musician I had never listened to before suddenly feeling like I knew him. Like in another life we shared a bottle of Dompo wine while he told me about Mary and I told him about Fredy, my own personal Fredy not him. It was a wall that carried his original handwritten songs. The papers were protected behind a glass (obviously) because I would have otherwise leaned in and sniffed just to try to get a sense of his life, if at all the smell of his hands had been retained in a paper he had touched (I can be sentimentally weird I know). “Windows” one paper was titled, in black ink and curve shaped letters. The first line went “Do you know how it feels when you don’t have a friend…” and then I swallowed a lump in my throat, because I knew that feeling all too well. And then I imagined him really gripping a pen in his hand as he was writing that, how was he feeling? what time was it? Where was he at? Who was he with? Alone? With Mary? What had he touched just before that pen and paper, an apple? His handkerchief? A door handle? His moustache? A tear?

And there I go, reading the whole of it and speaking softly the last words “Just believe, just keep passing the open windows”

Inside Freddie Mercury's museum, Zanzibar.

Those words have been an anchor ever since that day seeing them in Freddie’s handwriting. A window? Such a small thing, and I don’t know how it happens, that a small thing as such can give you a little hope. And sometimes a little hope is all you need, only a spark to start a fire, only an open window to dream and believe again. That very same day before leaving Stone town, my feet led to me to an old looking restaurant just a walking distance from the sea port. Scanning the seats with my eyes like only an introvert can in a restaurant, I did see a perfect spot, and of course, it faced an open window. Sitting there and drinking cold coke, Freddie’s words came back to me. An open window reminds you of possibility. Because you sit there, and a crow flies by and if you like metaphors, then you will think of freedom. You sit there and a couple are walking holding hands, and maybe you feel a promise of love. And you sit there and see a plane fading into the clouds and you think maybe one day you’ll have enough to afford a ticket to London.

Just this Tuesday I woke up with puffy eyes, from crying and staying half awake through the night. There’s a window in my bedroom and I wish I could say I opened it and it solved all my problems, it didn’t. But it was to remember that song and sing it. And I ask myself, what is hope, if it’s not singing in the dark. And I hope you know Freddie, that there’s a girl in Tanzania who still keeps looking through open windows, and calling it hope!