The novel I’m writing is currently 36,000 words. The collection sits at draft one. I should feel like I’m doing something good. But the sun is shining through the window at my left and it makes my laptop dusty. This is dust from my tiny studio, from work, from apartment. The people outside are happy in the light, moving with that extra speed added through the excitement and anxiety of under utilized light. These are the days in which I either flourish in new found sun, or suffer, as the world continues to move around me. This is the extra weight of summer, the awareness of moving as a singular entity when the world moves as couples, as group. My novel is 36,000 words long; written away from them, from you, on a dusty laptop heated through a summer window. I can’t help but think of all those days in my old room, the windows blackened with tinfoil, comfortable in my self imposed misery. I suppose I could own it then, because she was there. And now there is no she, no focus. It is that eternal she, smiling in tiny breezes which makes the pulsing of earphones worse. Which makes the disconnect a stabbing pain in place of subtle winter aches. This screen is dirty from my studio, and I’m a tired of hiding. My novel is 36,000 pages, and I haven’t felt her in years.