All my life I have had lighted window syndrome.

   Being outside someone’s window at night, and seeing the lighted window, its warm amber glow was an invitation to feel a sense of home, not to be at home, but to feel at home, and yet to remain a stranger, in a position of intimate remove.

   It was important to be near yet not in, because that left essential space for my imagination to participate, for speculation to arise. Imagination needs space to create and conjure. It understands the need for sufficient detachment, just enough neutral remove, a calculated distance. Too much and you went cold in all the wrong places, too little and you lost necessary perspective.

   Outside the lighted window I could fully engage my emotions in ways that I could not it if I were on the other side of that window, inside the house. One was a lucid dream-state, the other a state of reality, an actuality. To be inside the house meant to destroy something. Destroy what, exactly? The illusion, the ghost, the fiction. To be there and to not be there at the same time was always my goal, my dream. I suppose writing has allowed me to achieve this in a certain way.

   The lighted window—a lovely haunt, a symbol of purity, an incorruptible dream, a portal to other worlds, but mostly and always a sense of home where my spirit and mind go, and the rest of me is left behind (and happily so).