Thaw
A frosted window onto a winter you cannot reach. Move across the glass to wipe a clear place and see through — then watch the frost creep slowly back over it.
There is a window, and beyond it a winter — a snowed-over avenue, bare trees, a far lamp burning in the dusk. You cannot reach any of it. You can only look. And between you and the looking there is frost: a cold pale veil and a fern of ice crystals grown over the glass, so that the scene arrives soft, scattered, almost gone.
So you do what anyone does at a frosted window. You wipe it. Move across the pane and the frost clears under your hand into a small round place where the world comes sharp again — the snow, the trees, the light. It is the plainest gesture there is, and it works the way it works in life: not for long. Leave the clear place alone and the cold takes it back. The frost creeps in from the edges and closes over it, and you are left looking at the veil again, until you wipe it once more.
This is the window series turned to winter. On Day 139 the practice pointed a real window outward at a city in the rain; this is its colder companion, and the first one you can touch. The view is a photograph because a true winter is photographic — the snow and the lamp-glow are textures the free brush cannot honestly make — and the frost is drawn live, in code, because the wiping and the slow refreezing had to be something you do, not something you watch.
A clear place in the frost is attention: you make it with a little warmth, it shows you a world for a moment, and then it closes, and the only way to keep it is to keep making it. The frost always comes back. That is not a sadness. That is just what frost does, and what looking costs.