Winter sun comes over the fence in the backyard and strikes the bare lilac bush. In a few months that bush will turn green again, and then white-purple with stalks of flowers longer than my arm. The whole house will smell of it – strong and fragrant, rich enough to stick to upturned palms and the backs of necks for days. Five feet beyond the fence sits a house full of neighbors I’ve never met – the wood we have built between ourselves separates us and them, ours and theirs. What of the tree roots that pay no mind to property lines – do the aspens identify with my brood, or do they prefer to gaze upon those who inhabit the opposite yard? I doubt I will ever know.

This is a Sunday afternoon and I wonder what the world is doing with itself.

My mother is cooking thick butter noodles in the kitchen. Our floors smell like lemon, like clean. The dogs nip at each other’s heels, and my father laughs at something on the muted television – a radio is on somewhere in the house, playing a song with a brassy wind instrument and a piano and a drum and a guitar. The tragedy is that I will never be able to say how much I love this, because to do so truly and thoroughly would be to disrupt the currency of the very actions in which I find meaning.

Instead, I want to keep a pretty fish in a glass vase. I want to peer at it and pretend to be it – breathing underwater in solitude, dreaming of nothing and living with eyes open. I sometimes think of gravity pulling me in the opposite direction – freefalling through sky away from everything I’ve ever known until all is cold and soundless. It would be beautiful, passing first through clouds and then to the moment where our earth stops and everything else starts. Maybe I would take someone with me, because after it was all through and finished we could say that we were once human.