The door ruptured the balance of the room. When I set it open, the inside swayed and shook with wind. The room, with its books and pens, its cups and tea leaves. The walls tattooed with charcoaled notebook paper. The sleek assembly line machine of the newborn century, with letters inscribed on its keypad and a hum within its body, sleeping on a desk. The room, with its window frame; a single stenciled letter in the infinite language of the living. That frame stood somberly, black, as it presented its square of daylight to the sleepy souls inside. I sat looking, hands holding a mug, and my thoughts swam. They swam and sunk like a submarine and scaled like a mountain climber, as the brain strove to contain the framed window and beyond. The framed room and beyond. To be made to gaze motionless and dreaming through that frame, into that clouded sunlight – that is the imprisonment of youth. To sit and gaze and cultivate our monsters, so that each may appear in a passing cloud or a flicker of lightning; dancing before us like Plato\’s cave shadows on the walls of such a room. Dark dancing shapes of the powerful decade; shadows cast from the widescreen plasma glow of that appliance that connects us to the separate rooms of the sickly. Yet the doorway shook the foundations of my room. I sat inside, and she was to meet me when the world became dark, and twilight shone through that frame of window. We would venture a handshake with the wild lurkers, each sleeping in a shadow, and laugh through the darkness.