This is the first couple of paragraphs of a novel I am working on. The premise is this: we follow the life of one man on the day of June 17th for five years of his life. Each day is written in a different style of prose and from a different point of view. This is the first day.

June 17th, 2005

It is a Monday, and Philadelphia is on the verge of summer. For the first time in weeks, the weather has cooled and is comfortable. The day is warm but breezy, and the humidity has been flushed away by a very early morning rain. It is now early afternoon, shortly after one, and I sit on the black tar roof of my apartment. I am trying to write a letter.

Below me, Philadelphia looks new beneath an expansive, panoramic sky. It is a Montana, open air kind of sky: painted in broad, sinewy strokes with wind blown cirrus clouds that twist and contort and tumble over themselves like waves breaking on a reef, or the insides of a fresh loaf of bread. The sun flits in and out as the clouds drift from one horizon to the other, and the shadows two step and tango with the oak trees and passer bys on 11th Street, and the skyscrapers in Center City. All of it - the shadows and buildings and trees - seems alive and full of possibility. And this is what I feel on this warm spring day: I feel light and hopeful and possible, like I might drift someplace unknown and exciting.

Because of this, I should be able to write. But what I am trying to say eludes me. I start over, once then again, and the sky slowly matures a deeper blue, the sunlight ripening golder and richer. The afternoon threatens to wilt into the evening, and still I cannot find what it is I want to say.

This is a letter I have spent a long time trying to write, and in a way, it has begun to hinder my life. I spend many hours awake at night, drafting and formulating this letter. Then, when I am finally satisfied, I put a draft away and go to bed, often times after dawn. It is a bad writerly obsession of mine, in letters and the stories I have written since high school: I let a wrong word, or turn of phrase, ruin an otherwise satisfactory work, and I mull over the right word that is waiting somewhere to be discovered or saved, to the point of physical sacrifice. I have missed meals, lost sleep, given up sex, if I am engrossed enough in a piece of writing.

But these last few weeks have been the worst. This letter aside, I have found myself to be somewhat withdrawn. I have been strangely moved by, and have spent much of my time in, warm enclosed spaces: buried beneath the sheets of my bed with my windows blocked, or sitting Indian style beneath the warm torrent of my shower. Many days, now that school is over for the summer, I will sleep until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and shower until nearly six. By then, the day is in its waning hours, the bustle of its middle time having passed without my entering into it. It is this busy time of day when I usually find myself unable to concentrate on writing, or much of anything, and I end up feeling overwhelmed and discouraged.

Also during these past few weeks, my dreams have been of wandering, or drifting, and of a bodily chill. One night, I was lost in a barren wood, the earth snow covered and slatted with deep ravines. Another, I was in the middle of a black sea and in a boat with one oar, and my younger sister beside me, while ice bergs lumbered past around us. I wake up from these dreams with a sinking sensation in my gut, as if some absence has been lingering inside of me, unknown but for in my sleep. When I wake, I carry this mysterious absence with me, and lately it has begun to cloud my days with uncertainty and a lack of possibility. It has made me feel closed in the way a lost traveler is: far away from anywhere he would like to be, lost amongst an unknown and terrifying land.

But this warm afternoon, I feel the possibilities of the world pulling and tugging me outwards, into the open. I see these possibilities everywhere: in a sentence found, in a breeze down a secluded alley, in a woman crossing the street. I see them everywhere in this city. I feel good about this day, which is something I have not felt since coming back to Philadelphia.

Still. The letter I am writing my mother remains unfinished.