I am sitting in my bed. I know I am trapped. Everyone controls me whether they know it or not, with the look in their eyes, with their facial expressions and with every puny word they say, I must react to it in a way that pleases them. I have known since the day I was born that the way to get people to like you is to do what they want. I can't quit my job.

I entertain this daydream. Oddly, I wish for something like death. That hasn't happened in a while.

I yank up the blinds and open my window. The air is cold and soft, it is night, it smells like nighttime in the summer, soft wind. I climb out onto the roof. The night turns me into a ninja! It is easy for me to grab onto branches of the old oak and drop to the ground, everything is fluid. After that I start running in a straight line, hopping fences, thundering past all the sleeping stupid houses of suburbanites whose children never dream.  I keep running! I will never stop, I will never tire, it will always be night as if the whole world were dead!  I pick up speed, running faster than I ever have before. Pieces of my body become loose. The cutting air tears them off, my skin is chipping, my legs and arms are breaking down, I'm crumbling like stone structures in fast-motion. Pretty soon, I'm the size of a fist, hurling through the air. It feels like I have really left it all behind! Then I am a bird, a lowly house sparrow, brown and boring, the kind no one ever sees, but I can fly and I've left my human life, my human mind, all behind me on the pavement.

If that could happen right now I would be so happy.