Limbs sticking out at ridiculous tangents from widely overgrown bushes encroach upon a view so familiar that it coats my eyes like burn-in on a plasma screen.  The street, covered by allergy inducing grains that blend into the angled rays of sunlight, curves off to the right and slopes downwards.  A bird blasts out a D flat.  The even, white sound of automobiles cruising down Schraalenburgh Road in the distance is therapeutic, and only disturbed by the angry neighbors uttering grievances to each other in some Asian language.  I think it's Korean.

A few moments pass.

Then I notice that the chirping is no longer coming from neighbors, but from birds chasing each other in the driveway.  My eyes stray to the basketball hoop, unused for almost four years.  It looks out of place, unwanted, like the hideous cell tower on Terrace Street. 

An annoying humming sound, a D, comes from within the unruly bush from an indefatigable insect.  

A red toolbox sits at my feet.  It has been in the same place, on the same porch, for the past eleven years.  Inside are worm corpses, all that remains of my first pets.

The weather monitor pole rests on the ground, having fallen over nine months back in a thunderstorm.  

It will remain in its current position for nine more months.

And nine more after that.

And nine more after that.

Until the green paint wears off and the wood rots and the plastic contaminates the plants and another storm breaks it in half again.

A vase of dead sticks glints at me through the window.  I once helped peel some of the sticks.  I once thought they were beautiful.

I am four fifths finished serving my time at this nostalgic, comfortable, unchanging prison. But it is more of a graveyard than a prison.  I am the last surviving convict.