I suppose this is silly, really, putting it out here into the ether like this, but then again, my wife always said I kept too much inside and maybe she was right, God rest her soul. She passed on back in '09, November it was, and the quiet… well, the quiet can be a loud thing sometimes, especially when you’re used to two people making a life together and then suddenly it’s just one. And I’ve always been one for things being in their proper place, you see, a structure to things, which is perhaps why this started, what I’m actually trying to get off my chest here, if you can call it that. It’s not a secret, not really, just… something I don’t talk about, not with anyone here in town, because Lord knows the gossip would be something else entirely, and old Mrs. Henderson down the road would have a field day, bless her heart. She still talks about the time I accidentally ran over her prize-winning petunias back in '87, and that was almost forty years ago now, so you can imagine. It started a while back, probably in my mid-fifties, maybe a bit before, when I was still practicing law, corporate law mind you, quite complex stuff, mergers and acquisitions, antitrust cases, all that. It requires a certain precision of thought, a logical progression, and I was good at it, very good. But there’s a relentless quality to it, the constant pressure, the demands on your time, and I remember one particularly draining case, an arbitration, that had gone on for weeks, and I came home one evening, completely drained, and there was this kit my daughter, she was grown by then, had given me for Christmas, a plastic brick model of a castle. A small one, nothing elaborate, just a little thing. And I just… started building it. Not because I particularly wanted to, but because it was there, and my mind needed something else to latch onto besides the endless clauses and sub-clauses of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And it was… soothing. The click of the bricks, the clear instructions, the feeling of something taking shape under my hands that wasn't a legal brief or a deposition. It was a tangible thing, and when it was done, I felt a satisfaction I hadn't realized I was missing. (Which is a funny thing to say, isn’t it, for a man who’d won some pretty big cases and provided a good life for his family.) But it was different, somehow. No one was challenging my work, no one was looking for loopholes, it just… was. So I bought another kit, a bigger one, a proper medieval fortress with crenellated towers and a drawbridge, and then another, and another, and eventually, the spare bedroom, which became my home office after I retired and moved out here to the country, started filling up. Now it’s quite a sight, I suppose. The entire room, shelves from floor to ceiling, filled with these intricate structures. Castles, mostly. Some quite enormous, requiring thousands upon thousands of these little plastic bricks, and some of them I’ve even modified, added my own elements, little keeps and curtain walls that weren't in the original design, because I find myself thinking about the architectural integrity, the defensive capabilities, and it becomes a kind of… mental exercise, you see. I spend hours in there, sometimes late into the night, the lamp on, the quiet hum of the old refrigerator in the kitchen, and I’m just… building. And sometimes I wonder if it’s a form of escapism, a way to avoid the emptiness that sometimes creeps in, or if it’s something more, a sort of obsessive compulsive behavior (though I’ve never been diagnosed as such), or maybe just an elderly man finding a quiet hobby, but it feels like more than that. It feels necessary, somehow. Like I'm building order out of… well, out of everything else. And I don't know what happens to them, these castles. I mean, they're not going anywhere. My grandkids, when they visit, they look at them with a kind of bewildered awe, and they'll say, "Grandpa, these are so cool!" and I'll explain a bit about the design, the history, and they'll nod, but I don't think they really get it. And I don't expect them to. But there's a part of me that just wishes… (I don't know what I wish, exactly.) That someone understood the meticulous care, the hours, the sheer volume of tiny plastic pieces that come together to make something so complex and yet so utterly… contained. It's a world I build, brick by brick, and it's mine, and that’s a comfort, I suppose, but also a little bit lonely. And I keep building. There's a new kit on order, a German Neuschwanstein, and it's supposed to be quite the challenge.