I inspect from my office window frame the season’s transformation—the red to the gold, the snow to the sun, awaiting escapism. The mundane tragedy of a corporate existence extracts the very life within like the squeezing of an orange. All the good bits inside are expelled for the pleasure of another. For I will never taste the truest zests of the juice. I will remain, eyes glued to the pane, observing what goes about on the other side while the clock ticks… For the larger part of my life, I have been ensnared in a net of black and white– of paper and pens, ethics, and performance evaluations. The delight of maturity in grade school was a predatory falsehood served with faux hopefulness. I, like so many others, swallowed the reality. I graduated college with the ambition of financial prosperity and occupational ventures but found I am a caveman primitively existing amongst folks shackled to their vices. The art of fire, my only spoken language, is lost to all memory. Hidden in the dark, oral stories of long ago and the peril of what the end of the age will bring– haunt me. I will live out the rest of my days behind this bureau until another faux promise comes to fruition. Then, I will depart this world and pass on into the subsequent, not knowing what life could have been if I seized the risks it presented.