Security Lighting

I’d hole up in my room, burrowing like a hamster. And quite a little den it was. My desk was a slab of wood over two filing cabinets; my bed was a pancaked old futon that I rolled right out on the floor. A hard chair, a narrow bookcase, a secondhand computer—that was pretty much it. I would sleep till noon, then stay up reading until four or five in the morning, blocking the glare from the security lights in the airshaft with an old woolen blanket that hung from a couple of nails I had pounded into the window frame. When it was time for my 3:00 A.M. dinner of ramen noodles or English-muffin pizza, I’d wait a few seconds after turning on the kitchen light, to give the roaches a chance to hide. I was in my late twenties, in other words, and still living like a college student. I was having trouble growing up—one of the reasons, in fact, that I’d gone back to school in the first place. I’d been out in the world for a few years, had had a couple of jobs, but I still hadn’t learned how to cope with life on my own. Simple things, like buying a bottle of shampoo, would make me catatonic with confusion ...»