This is what I need.

A week. A week with no emails and work and friends and any notion of other people, other souls in the world. It could be a week out of every year. Every half-year. Every month. Or just next week.

A house in New England. It doesn’t have to be mine, just mine for that week.

The house would be surrounded by a modest, empty patch of land — modest only in New England terms; empty only by my urban standards. It would be musty, rolling, and trees will stand there; the kind you can sit beneath if you’re not wearing anything expensive. I wouldn’t. There would be a lake, and it will be mysterious and more that I would explore full of old things that were thrown in, that were spat out, that were carved in stones on its tiny beach. There would be gloomy patches where the sun never seems to really light, and they would be especially gloomy and frightening and exciting when the sun hangs low and pale in gray skies over the steely surface of the lake.

In the summer, it would be winds that blow through the faint heat; in the winter, it would be snow piling over trees and under them, and the lake freezing and becoming more steely under the low-hanging sun.

There would be a simple bedroom. A warm kitchen with windows to the lake. A table, on which to write. A dented, scratched pick-up to get groceries from the nearest town, which would be an hour’s drive away. And a table with an old laptop, no email, no web, just robust enough to write on – hours and hours a day in this New England summer and winter, with the sun in the lake in the kitchen window.

Birds would sing, and I would hear them; spiders will inch along old, unpainted windows, and I would notice every detail of the spider and the wood; all the world will slow to the rhythm of words in my head, the slow, rolling progress of the sentences. The gloomy trees and the cracking steps will guard against fast things coming to haunt me from outside: deadlines, plans, appointments, arguments — and that swaying voice, speeded up and scary, of traffic: this cardiac-arrest of a heartbeat, all too fast and loud, that we city-born carry with us.

I would write, in the quiet echoing only the sound my fingers make on the keys of the keyboard, slower things. I would write for a week. And then I’d take a cab and head for a large airport and rush, jet engines hollering beside me, and land with the force of several hundred tons, and speed 120 back home, and be content with the city and its cardiac-arrest beat.