From here, you can see wide white lights and computer screens. You can hear clicks and clacks and rapidly-tapped keys, sniffles, the jingle-jangle of chains or house keys or car keys; there is a comfortably muffled buzz, words said everywhere; here, you are surrounded by soft blank jungles of harmless noise.

Though I cannot see out the windows that lie beyond this room, I can imagine the tennis courts staring in through them, soaked red and green and dreary. Oh, we are all complaining about the state of the weather, oh how yucky, oh how ugly it is. But I wonder, is it any better out there, would it perhaps be a refreshing journey to stroll along the perimeter, to visit the lonely courts simply to be surrounded by something cold and wet? something concrete, something bitingly, insistently, existent?

Our environment is being invaded by so many housing developments and commercial ventures and ugly complexes and plazas and structures and oh! who wants to be out in the world when it is raining? I wonder, is it so wonderful to be enclosed? I have been leaving my windows open at night, just to let in the frigid midnight air, but every morning I am asked to close them. Stifled, stifled, always pushed into some tiny compartment of expectations and conformities and standards. Take a walk at night, the police stop you on the sidewalk. Go home. Go to bed. Well, I might just take the longest walk I have ever taken. I might just not come back. Every day, I feel farther and farther away from this created sense of place. I wonder if I belong. Anywhere. It becomes more and more difficult to speak about anything of value, even to that perpetually haloed boy or that forever-smile or anyone admirable. I have been so brave, but I cannot name this current mindset. Cannot categorize it, and I have spent so long pondering upon it.

Still, when I see the sunset across the field from your front yard, I wonder, "How can anyone possibly want anything?"

It is all such a knotted mess of things.

in our house you can leave the windows all the time and the only thing stopping you on your walks will be small bugs asking to be looked at