All through my childhood, until my early teens, I had a daydream. It was that my parents’ friends—who were scattered across the country, and who we’d see only a few times a year—would all move to live on our street, and I’d be able to go and sit with them when things were hard at home, which was a lot of the time. I would have this daydream every day. But our street consisted only of other people, equally shut away, equally alone.
