A couple of months will pass, at most, and then you will be able to reclaim your place, demonstrate once and for all that the walls belong to you when they do not belong to someone else. That your fears are no more than pleasures upturned and outfitted with bird feathers and grit from the floor of the abandoned warehouse up the road. I imagine the future as something embossed, patterns and words punched into it, patterns and words that I can’t make out at the moment but which will come into focus soon enough. And then, of course, I will want to spend all my time deciphering those associated with the past, will wish I had spent more time paying attention before it was too late. But it is always too late. That’s why some people refer to the human condition as a condition and not a temporary fix or a permanent fresco. They know what they are talking about. I, on the other hand, rarely have so much as a promising clue. When I ask someone to slow down, to elaborate on or illustrate a particularly difficult point, more often than not that person makes a sucking noise between her teeth and turns in the other direction. I will not be deterred by anything so flimsy as body language, though, as human communication in any of its guises. I turn inward and find there the same sorts of concepts and progressions and I know I couldn’t have put them there because they seem so completely comfortable already. Like marmots in their caves. Just try dislodging such entities with your bare hands! The noise they make, the unholy racket and the flesh wounds! What is it we are supposed to do with what has been placed before us but which we did not request? Can we find our way around it or are we cursed to include it in our every waking conversation? Is it possible to ignore the given altogether and concentrate instead entirely on that which we have invented because invention is as close as we will ever get to filling the world up with emptiness? The light is degenerating and the clock no longer functions and when I try to stand up, the walls close in like sandstorms. Somewhere outside people are building a fence. I can hear the hammering, the shouting back and forth as regards dimensions and materials, the occasional grunt as eloquent and full of import as any tractate on the career of Hannibal. Or a gaze held across the room.