I’m sitting outside. It’s dark enough for the street lights to cast a Palo Alto glow on the road. It’s cold out, early September, and I’m grateful for the breeze shooting through my sweater. A comfortable chill. I breathe in deep, the crisp air feels full in my lungs with the scent of night, the cinnamon in my tea, and dinner on my fingers. I am alone, and surrounded by all of my favourite people. They have left their places in the past, the future, their pages and their screens, to sit with me. They spread out on the hill around me, without saying a thing, all of them in a collected silence, exactly what my people inside couldn’t be.

I continue to take in whole breathes of the moment, drawing the air in until it’s climbed over the wall in my chest and back out into the street. In one of these inhalations I smell skunk, and think about going back inside to avoid being sprayed. But the scent isn’t strong enough to cause alarm over reason, so my mind wanders. I find myself lost for a minute or two, wondering what it would be like to join the skunks. Become part of a burrowing, monochrome world. I think about how magnificent it would be to have a big, bushy tail and little pink pads on the bottoms of my feet to dopely wander the neighborhood amongst my striped brethren. And whiskers! Do skunks have whiskers? But how magnificent whiskers would be!

I hear the door open… and then close. My sister most likely, sent to look for me by my parents.  I’m hidden at the bottom of our lawn, a hill that is  absolutely inconvenient for mowing. Our grass is hated by the entirety of the street.

The cold has turned the tea I spilled on my pants into an uncomfortable damp cow spot on my leg. The wind whips my hair in front of my face, the cold fills me again, and I picture myself sitting here. I picture myself from the outside in this exact moment. My hair over my small face and turned up nose. I do this a lot, picture myself from the outside. I think it keeps me grounded. Reminds me that I am no more and no less that myself, and I never will be.

I could stay in this moment forever. I want to live heer and now for as long as I possibly can. I consider sitting her until morning, until the people come out and the sun shines and it no longer feels special. This realization is what makes me get up, even though I’m not done with the cold air and the pretentious glow of the lights, and I walk up the hill to my house. I open the door thinking about how wonderful it would be if no one spoke to me until tomorrow, lunch. But I close the door behind me, the pleasant cold rushing out of me and my father says, “Hey kiddo.” And I smile, because he ruined it. I sit down with my family, allowing their needless chatter to replace the cold. Their voices anger me, sadden me, delight me, and I know that I will never be able to return to that moment outside again.

I don’t know how this makes me feel.