Sometimes, if I watched at night, I would see her poking her head out of one of those red windows. Illuminated by moonlight, she was beautiful. Her hair looked like liquid silver. Her skin was creamy white.

But that’s just what I saw of her. For all I know, I may have hallucinated the whole thing.

To me, at least, she was real. And she was shut up inside a stone brick building, behind two red-shuttered windows. In my thirteen-year-old head, she needed to be saved. I pictured myself marching up to the door a thousand times. In my head, I would push aside the door man and rush inside to save the ailing damsel in distress.

Sometimes, if I watched long enough, and still enough (if she saw me, she’s shut the window immediatly) I could hear music floating out from in between the stones themselves, it seemed. I imagined her there, playing an ancient piano, as her silver hair shone in the moonlight.

The truth was, she looked like an aparition. And my mind tells me now that maybe she was.