Time in a Bottle

Scary

My writing space is the scariest fucking room in my apartment.

The street light hangs at shoulder height, hovering like some mechanical all-seeing eye outside my second floor window.

The closed curtains hang unevenly, a jagged crevice of cloth allowing only a sliver of light, as if peaking through a cracked door (like Poe's deranged tenant in the Tell Tale Heart).

Even during the darkest hour of a man's soul (it is currently 3:36 am) you can still hear the comings and goings of people as far as a half-mile away. If the breeze is right I can hear the elevated Red Line stop at Loyola and the robotic voice of the conductor, "Doors closing, Granville is next," in that menacing monotone.

It's alarming to know that there are people moving through the city at this late hour. Cars, trucks, the occasionally cranky motorcycle, roll within yards of where I sit. (I can't imagine how close they must feel to people living on the first floor.) No wonder the impulse to climb mountains or the increase in rent as you ascend (the penthouse always costs more than the first floor), the higher up you are the less you hear, and the safer you feel.

If I can hear them, see them, hell, sometimes smell them (or at least I can smell whatever they're smoking) then they can just as easily observe me.

I'm exposed up here in my glass bubble. We've hung no curtains or blinds. Each window is as wide open as a field with nothing to keep someone from watching me closely with even the cheapest binoculars.

It's scary up here. I've never felt so exposed in my life.

A Room Of My Own

My office is the sun porch of our Rogers Park apartment.

My monitor faces a window some six feet tall and half as wide. A window the same size stands to its left so that I essentially face a wall of approximately 36 square feet of glass. Immediately to my left (so close if I reach toward it I don't have to fully extend my arm to touch the glass) are three windows, each the same six feet high, though slightly narrower. Six feet behind me is the mirror image of arranged glass as the side-by-side mirrors in front of me.

Eight feet to my right hangs a heavy curtain of luxurious red and gold, separating me from the rest of the house.

We're on the second floor some twenty feet off the ground and thee tree outside the window is twice that tall. In summer the thickest foliage abuts the building at my eye level and squirrels scamper from the trunk to my sill on a daily basis, occasionally pausing to use their little hands (with the most delicate little fingers thin as claws) to eat some found treasure (and maybe contemplate the guy on the other side of the glass...sitting in that chair and tapping his fingers against that contraption).

In the winter the trees, of course, are bare and the lower sun throws long, thin shadows., like abstract, fine lattice work.

It's very much (I imagine) like living in a glass house. When people speak of rooms with "good natural light" they're talking about my office. It's like writing in a tree house.

It's the most creation-inducing space I've ever lived in, my 50 or so square feet of sun porch.