Fenced in.

When I was about fifteen years old, a close friend of mine told me that I put walls up around myself in order to block out the rest of the world. He told me that I draw invisible boundaries that don't really exist in order to protect myself from people. He called me silly. He called me crazy. He told me that if I remained that guarded, I would never be able to be close to anyone. Ever.

He was right, of course. Ah, the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old boy.

But he was right only insofar as my guarded nature applied to people I never wrote to. For some reason, once I start writing, I stop thinking, and the walls come down. I've always known this, I suppose, but it wasn't fully realized until today, when I was perusing the Web site of my college newspaper and found old articles and columns I'd written. I would say anything. Anything at all about what I was feeling or thinking, and it never seemed to matter.

So in that manner and spirit, I throw this thought out there into the World Wide Web - a strange faux-Universe unto itself.