It begins with vision. Surfaces, textures, colors, shapes - disappearing, reappearing, being molded, evolving, always in constant flux. Waiting until understanding is reached. There doesn’t have to be a who or a what or even a why, just an understanding, however minimal. Light and dark play across the surfaces demanding attention through the sheer intensity of contrast. Bodies of infinite varieties, designs, colors, backgrounds, and reasons – all taking good morals for granted, just like life. Not questioning why, because 'why' isn’t a question any more, it’s just a word, like all words. Hurrying down roads, choosing a prong in the fork without hesitation, and following. The romance of sitting in a tower separate from the elements, the worries, the fears and thoughts colliding is an elusive dream. In this semi-awareness I sit looking through glass windows, thousands of different windows, always with the same vision and the same results. The people, the immediate environment, and beyond that a severed distance, a complete separation from what I can only imagine to exist. Distant observation makes a cold and impersonal machine, labeling the nameless faces with the bias of a skewed perception. I wouldn’t be able to hear them if they screamed. Not to worry, not much matters beyond a window-glazed perception. Not when growing old makes you forget to care about something as irrelevant as the way they look at each other, their political views, who they love, or what they believe. When eyes are tired and can barely be lifted from the page to view world, there is a digression back to nowhere, back to away, past what can be seen and what is believed. It is universally agreed – life isn’t fair, bad things happen to good people, young people die early, and the rest of their complaints. But why does it matter when each person limits themselves to the immediate, the frank, the quick and easy way to go about their lives. Where is the contrast, the overkill, the surrender, the politics, the starvation, the punishment, the war, the honor, and the reward? Where is the life in living and the death in dying? It is not here, not behind a barricade of windows. My voice is silence to them. And although I can see them on their roads, from a distance, I am lost in un-surrounding. I have never been there, and I will never have what you have. The surrender kills, I shatter the windows and diffuse the life support; I can feel the world fill my lungs like a fluid, drowning me. You don’t know me but I will be a beautiful casualty. You find me, too late for you to know. I cannot move - suddenly the abstraction of time seems unjustly real. There are so many people walking, talking, still on their way to something, still choosing to act and face the consequence. Simple cause and effect, like everything else. I can imagine all of it. And it ends with the regression of vision back into the world.