There's a girl outside. He knows this, but he doesn't turn around to look at her. He has turned his back on her, has turned his back on a lot of things for longer than he'd like to admit, but he doesn't plan on turning towards her soon. Or at all, for that matter. There's a gate between them, an imaginary wall that he dares not cross. For the moment, she seems a little preoccupied, but he knows one thing: soon, she's not going to be preoccupied anymore. Or occupied at all, never mind the pre-. Soon, she's going to turn around, she's going to break the wall, break it down, and he'd have to do what he's done hundreds, thousands of times. He was going to have to run, run as far as he could, push the broken wall back together, put it back together so it was stronger than before, and he's going to make sure it doesn't break again. Even though he knows it will. He can't make this wall unbreakable, and he really wants to, and he doesn't want to. Soon, she's going to take one of her hands and push through this boundary that he set up, and he's going to be violated, and all he can do is run, because there's nothing else to do. There's nothing else he can do, even if somehow he found the strength and courage to do so. Even now, the concepts are foreign to him, something he doesn't know, doesn't understand, doesn't know what he needs, doesn't know what he wants, doesn't know anything, and all he can do it sit there and hug his knees because that's what cowards do. Even in all the years that have come and gone, all that fills his head comes and goes, the same cycle swirling in the same way over and over and over again until everything that was once in there is cleansed and removed so that everything echoes and repeats to become a foundational fact of the world and of life itself. It bounces off the walls of a chamber to reflect on itself and wrapped itself in others that warped its original meaning.

It's not like he cared anymore, though. If he had cared at all, then he wouldn't be here, and he wouldn't be nearly making a career out of running. If he had cared at all, maybe he'd be out there, far beyond this small wall, beyond running and building and reconstructing. Maybe he wouldn't be here, here hugging his knees, here looking for an excuse to not run, to not stay, to not move, to not be here, to not be elsewhere, to not be. Sometimes, he tells himself that it's just how things are meant to be. In order for other people to be happy, then there must be unhappy people. That is his role in life. Some days, he believes it, because if he doesn't believe it, then what would become of him? This sadness was something inherent, something that was just fate. In the songs, people fight against fate; in the books, people fight against fate; but this was real life, people don't fight against fate in real life. He knows that fights against fate always resulted in a loss, and defeat was a taste that had lingered for so long in his mouth that the taste had gotten stuck on his tongue. Every time he drew in breath, he was reminded of the victories that he could never get. It was one of those things that circled around in his chamber, one of those things that laid the foundation of his life. It was an inescapable fact of sorts, one that embedded itself so deep into the ground that it was impossible to get out, impossible to get at, impossible to even look at clearly, yet its signals were everywhere. It was a web that stretched its fingers through every nook and cranny that existed, yet the base appeared nonexistent. Once upon a time, he tried to run. Before running was made his almost-career alongside building and reconstruction, he tried to run. He had thought that if such a concept was weighing him down to bits at the edges of the world, then maybe if he had just tried hard enough and worked enough and didn't give up for long enough, then he could get out. But when the web appeared and stuck him down from the edges of the world, he knew there was no such thing as getting out. There was no way to leave and all he was left with was broken passion and a stupid amount of material to start building.

It was quite a large amount.