In my home I sit at a desk in my room, next to a large bay window. Although my desk faces the wall, I am often drawn in moments of thought towards the window. The street is quiet and there are few cars, but there are often people of various types. Mothers take their children to school, these ones I know and recognize. Some of them I’ve given personalities, there is a distant familiarity to them. Others are purely unknown, I can only guess at their purpose as they appear at one end of the street and vanish at the other, returning to their lives outside my watchful eye.

I spend long hours sitting in my desk chair, digging my bare feet into the soft red pile carpet as cold winds sweep around my calves. The lighting in the room has been carefully composed for tones of warmth and texture. I call it home, it’s my domain of safety. The soft yellow pastel of the walls is fading, but as it does so it grows in history and richness.

In this other house, the roof is high and light flows in at interesting angles. I cannot help but admire its beauty in form and structure. My bare feet cause the floorboards to creak as I cross the large open plan room — encompassing living room, kitchen and dining room — searching for activity. Here I have security. Indeed, I am security, employed as I am as the guardian of the house, rather than as its guest.

There is a high fence around the house. I have locked the gate, the porch door and the front door. The various shapes of window provide two layers glass between me and the outside world. The shadows in the dark startle me with their impressions of humans, but there are no people here. I wake up in the darkness after early hours spent in the guest bedroom alternating between the radio, books and attempts at stillness. The guest room is cold, forgotten by a quirk of the heating, as if it knows it’s temporary resident is alien to the household.

Three days pass and I have remained in the house. I left briefly for food, a trip that takes 10 minutes to the local Sainsbury’s. On my journey a man tries to sell me drugs, I warn him off with a mumbled reply and a suspicious glance. The queue for the humanless self checkout is long, so I find Stuart, an extremely thin man with sunken eyes. His burgundy staff shirt is almost comically oversized. As he weakly jokes with me I wonder silently the extent of his addiction. I treat his attempts at friendliness with mild hostility, wishing I had waited for the predictable unburdensome phrases of the computer.

That strange cloud has followed me out and back again. The world of perception is coloured by many things. Sometimes in unpleasant days my landscape is grey, bleak and desolate. Other times it’s filled with electricity, a delightful buzzing sensation that crackles in the air. Today is neither of those, a sense of the unreal pervades. I wander the house looking for something that will return my connection to reality to me, but everything I touch feels fake, like a film set not intended to be scrutinized in person.

The family returns a few days later. We exchange formalities and I catch the train home a short distance. Though the suburban line cuts through built up areas of housing and town centres, it’s passes through two lush green layers of trees and bushes, sloping up to hide the city beyond. The effect is to believe that one is being transported through a rural parish, distant from mundane and earthly realities. A vision soon compromised.

I put my key in the front door and swing it open carefully. I bring my bags through into my room at the front of the house and take a seat at my desk. It has many circular stains on it, made by the many times I’ve neglected to use a coaster on the unvarnished surface. I lazily run my fingers over the differing textures, letting my mind rest on the purely sensual for a moment before I return to thought.

I am distracted by movement in my periphery through the large bay window. I peer through winter’s dessicated bushes. It’s three thirty and a mother walks past, hurrying to meet her child at the school gates opposite my house. Again I’m distracted. A young man walks past in the opposite direction, glancing up at me as he does so. I look away, strangely embarrassed in my private space. Through the single pane a breath of humanity comes through. My finger still rests in the groove of a stain. I feel connected.