Outside of my window, cicadas and crickets hum mishmash songs. The earth is damp and muddy but warm. Water drains into a runoff grate. A sheen of oil slicks the grass in places, a milky blue film on the water. I hear the croaking of an invisible frog. A heat pump drones to itself noisily. Another afternoon storm has moved through in minutes. My mattress is on the floor, my window open. I closed the air conditioning vent on the ceiling to get a better feel for the temperature of the outside world. My moon and star mobile spins quietly, perhaps deciding whether or not to come unstuck again in the night. I wind my father’s alarm clock and click a switch on another by the desk. A program on my computer tells me the moon is on the wax again, having previously waned to newness. It’s been overcast lately, but that’s not why I haven’t seen the actual moon since it was full. ‘Is the month already more than half gone?’ I wonder to myself. Another evening spent mostly in my room unfolds. Between the buildings on sunny afternoons, an obscene number of squirrels are hopping and clucking. Lately, I’ve had to dodge squirrels that seem to be playing chicken in the streets of campus. Walking to and from work, I’ve seen them just lying in the grass, sprawled out--dead--apropos of nothing. There’s a Japanese saying, Saru mo ki kara ochiru. ‘Monkeys also fall from trees.’ I suppose these are spring’s children. Slowly, natural selection. Page after page of electronic text dripping down the screen. Scrolling on and on until a click, everything flashes, and another page appears. The hours move glacially, but the days flow like petals on a stream. Each morning finds itself later and later—8:10, 8:20, 8:45, 9AM—until the week cycles back and resets the counter. Lunch time and quitting time advance in a likewise manner. Inside of my perfectly orthogonal office, I hear the whirling of the fans of many computers. Occasionally, someone stops by outside the room to pick up a hard copy. A nod. On my bed, so close to the floor, I absorb the space around me. When I first arrived, sleep deprived and semi-coherent, I planned the arrangement of my room. Finding it impossible to conceive the best layout, I embarked to find the opposite of the best. The room was consciously made to block flow, to stifle chi, and impede thought. Karmic energy just puddles up in the dirty carpet. Inaction becomes a buzzword. I wanted to simulate living out of a suitcase, camping out, and the conscious temporality of a journey. Things were hidden in plain sight. The bed propped on its side, its springs stuff with photographs. Posters were purposefully obscured behind dresser drawers. Around dusk, lightning bugs blink “Love Me!” in Morse Code. I try to catch them one night, but it’s no use. I see the bug flash, focus on its now non-illuminating body, only to watch it vanish, melt into the unfocused air around it. The bug has returned to the parallel dimension where it and cicadas and crickets exist, only occasionally allowing one of the senses to see or hear them through the void. In my room, I wonder what day it is. ‘If I close my eyes long enough, it will be tomorrow.’ Week and weekend are separated by a wall of sleep and a boredom of a different texture. I’ve taken to listening to all my records in the order I bought them, just to kill time. Having a listening order reduces my choices to one, more now or later? There's no bothering with thinking about to what I'll listen. I’ve eaten so many meals alone. Breakfast, lunch, diner. Eating in, eating out. Cereal, sandwiches, Waffle House, Pizza House, Pete’s, Patrick’s, Publix, Ingles. My tongue is slowly cloaked in the taste of isolation, even as the natural world outside revels in the sound and light of fertility. In my bed the other night, as I was trying to sleep, it rained in my room. As I sat in my bed, not quite asleep, I heard a sound, like a drop. One noise though, I could write off. Moreover, I found my sheet to be not unnaturally damp. I ignored it, actively. Got back to the task of losing consciousness. Thereupon, I heard the sound of two drops, in rapid succession. Each had the distinct, couched sound of a tiny droplet colliding with a synthetic fabric. Like the sound of rustling sheets only much smaller in scope and more liquid in texture. Sadly, this I could not ignore. I roused myself, to find its source. Above my head, I spied a beading surface of water. It seemed that around the closed central air vent, the muggy humidity of the air outside my window had found the perfect place to congregate until gravity once more took hold of it. The sound of my father’s mechanical clock ticking unevenly and yet a fourth drop. Figuring that the vapor pressure must be equal throughout the room, I guessed that my sheets would dry at a rate equal to the falling of precipitate. Ignore. I closed my eyes and listened to the artificial raindrops splattering just above my chest and the mishmash songs of cricket and cicadas outside my window, the elegy of a summer both electronically and organically slipping away.