I was watching a movie the other day and there was a scene with a child playing in an empty schoolyard. It reminded me of how I always used to go play in the schoolyards on the weekends. There was something very... peaceful about it. Usually, it was full of screaming kids and such... but when I came there on weekends, it seemed so peaceful... as if time had frozen. I had always gone to my old elementary school by the park. It was a great place, with the "hidden playground" behind the school... but there was the school a hundred yards down the hill from my house, where I would spend summers playing baseball with the neighbor kids and autumns playing football... but when we weren't doing that, I would often walk down the steps from the playground as if to head to the doors that led back into the school... but when I got to the bottom, instead of heading for the doors, I would head left, down the driveway that led towards the gym locker door and the cafeteria... walking along the side of the school... so quiet... so unfamiliar in its familiarity. I would read the graffiti from the '70s scattered along the back wall... and re-read it. You couldn't see the schoolyard, you couldn't see the street... and probably more importantly, no one on the street or in the yard could see me. I could just go there and sit on a little seat that looked like it had been carved in the earth along the fenceline a hundred years ago... I could sit there, and just be. I lived in a huge patch of forest in the middle of the city, and I had probably twenty different places like that... places I could just disappear for a while. Only a couple rivaled the little nook by the old cafeteria at the school at the bottom of the hill. The tower at the old monastery was the best... Sometimes, I would sneak out of my house on a school night and head over and up the seemingly thousands of steps in the pitch black... I had walked them so many times, I had the imperfections of each piece of slate memorized and never lost my step... On an autumn night, you could see the entire city from the tower... all the lights... the bridges... everything. I never got caught up there, in all the times I went. Even if I had, all the nuns had known me since I was five, and they wouldn't have done anything, anyway... I had free reign of the property, it seemed. But standing in that tower, looking over the city... it just felt like I dissolved into vapor and hung there high above the city, like a cloud... like nothing. I was everywhere... I was... nowhere.