Everything here is fenced off and it doesn't matter what you do, no one is going to care or see it. You have absolute freedom but then you have absolute ignominious anonymity too. You can say whatever you want and there is no comeuppance. This is a play-area where anything goes, it's barely supervised, with only the hardiest of fence-keepers still keeping watch.

There are people who still convince themselves - - whether or not they truly believe it I cannot say - well yes, I think they actually do believe it - - that this is real life and that their actions have real-life consequences. There are people who pretend that they're doing something real and substantial, perhaps not original but still true, and so they put in the effort - effort albeit with regard to the rewards they feel they'll reap - minimal, shoddy, wayward effort, effort they feel is enough to produce the results they're seeking, a word of praise, a pat on the back, scraps of positive reinforcement, all delivered in signs and signals by the fence-keepers and their motley group of associated fence-regime proponents: signs that the people are making sense, signs that what they're doing is convincing and moving, signs that they're still very much seen, signs that they should keep doing the same thing they were and have been doing always and perpetually, signs that perpetuate the fantasy that their deeds and their actions will lead to something, a 'something' always loosely defined, a something in the manner of a pinnacle of action, a conglomeration of all the things they do and have done in this little fenced-off area, a sort of intangible and undefined catalogue of all the minutiae that humans can engage in behind our four walls - our little configuration of fences - yet the outside world can't see in nor can we see out and it is a microcosm.

These people who pretend to themselves that this is real life, do they not actually see the fence? Can they not see its very normal brown slat-arrangement, its concrete posts, can they not see where it bulges and bends but with no real sense of pregnability, can they not see that the fence runs all the way round us, almost rectangular, perhaps slightly rhomboid, can they not actually see that wherever you are in our little fenced-off space you can always see the fence on all sides?

If they can see the fence, these people, then how can they deny its reality? How can they say it is not there? How can they expect us to countenance and agree that there is no fence, or ignore the fence, support the idea that the fence is transient, how can they really say to themselves, first and foremost, that whatever they're doing isn't within the confines of an obvious fence? What do they want to gain by denial? They must be afraid of the real world. They must be happy with this tiny patch of land and the interactions they have, with all the grossly limited results it brings forth, with the infantile consequences, the over-enthusiastic praise, the lies, the barefaced lies, frittered away into the wind, the sound of which is never picked up on the other side of the fence - the fence-keepers would never allow that - and all this effort will never make it one centimetre outside of our patch, it will never be seen, heard, smelled, no one will come into contact with it, and the only ones who ever see anything are the other ones inside the fenced area,  the fenced-in few, the ones who play along with the lie, who never go out, who never will, but above all who'll never categorically state that they know what and who they truly are, limited, unproven, incomplete, banal.

The fence-keepers - apparently there are seven or eight at any one time - all of different standing, each responsible for a different part of the fence, most for only the foundations and the posts, the most secure parts, the bits where intrusion is least likely to occur, and then one or two tending to the top where the tallest of people could lean over or where the wind could do damage requiring a firmer degree of oversight - incidentally the most competent fence-sitter is handed the most trivial task of hammering haphazardly onto one of the corner fence posts fortnightly on Sundays - these fence-keepers don't necessarily keep us inside, they don't prevent us from leaving, but then the work that they do, their fence-tending, their perennial maintenance keeps the fence in place and the more secure the fence, the more likely it is that we stay in its confines.

If you happened to wander up to the top half of one of the fences, not that you would actively climb it but there are footholds in places, if you found that something you did pushed you up out to the upper reaches of the fence, then the very fact that the posts had been recently reinforced, that the slats had been clad - they are sometimes bolstered - wouldn't this point to the fact that fence-keepers are responsible for our limitations, our short-sightedness, that they promote small-mindedness, that they certainly don't encourage us to branch out and seek what could be a much fuller life outside, that they are at the very least complicit in our fantasy that we have already understood and assimilated the whole world, that we have performed to it and conquered it, that we have given and received at par?

And the very fact that the fence-keepers promote this type of thinking is sufficient for us fenced-in dwellers, enough to convince us, to suck us in, enough ultimately to pacify, to liberate  us from the need to climb out, to exert the effort, to need to be seen to do it, with the fence-keepers right there watching you, whatever the intentions of the fence-keepers, enough to confirm that they bring about paralysis and maintenance of the status quo.

If some of them want to believe that what they do in our little fenced-off place carries weight outside it, assuming they don't actually deny the existence of the outside world completely - and I wouldn't write off their holding this belief - if they want to believe it, then why shouldn't they be forced to open up the fence somewhere and just walk out of our fenced space? If there are those who maintain that they are complete and wholesome beings built of complete and wholesome actions then why shouldn't they have to put money to mouth and see how they fare? It is easy to knock a slat out of the fence; there is no rule against it as long as it is replaced shortly after, there has never been any suggestion that we are forced to live in our little fenced-off land, yes, it might be more convenient for the fence-keepers this way. But the point is that they are inert; they have no power over the actual fence save to maintain it, and such is the complacency of those who stay on this hemmed-in side of the fence as opposed to scaling it - they are of the greatest ignorance and short-sightedness - that they don't deserve the protection the fence confers and even less so when they are unable or unwilling to concede for a moment the entire paradigm of its creation.

But then I get the impression that a few of our fenced-in dwellers are quite content with their small-worldliness, that they might even go as far as to acknowledge it, not outwardly, but if pushed they might confess that though the wider world lies beyond the fence, the fence-world fulfils them. And then so what to be a little deluded, or so what if they are incomplete, they might claim that the fenced world has its own self-contained power, self-generated status. And though this is a bit of a fudge, why can't we allow them to get on with it as they do, to believe what they do, why should we feel the need to correct and disabuse, why do we feel the need to rob them of their contentment?

It is then the few and the minority, the purists, who will always draw attention to the limitations of the fenced space, who will always draw attention to its blighted relationship to the whole, will draw attention to the fact that it is overshadowed. And those purists feel - perhaps they only think they do - that they are unwarrantedly passed over by the fence-keepers - there have been no signals passing between the two in years - that the fence-keepers do not want to be drawn into debate about our fenced-area status, they do not want to be reminded of anything bar that which transpires within the fence, save for the most remarkable and rare exceptions which even then do not successfully call into question the legitimacy of the area and the existence of the fence in the first place, they want to take the fence as a given, and anyone who appears to cast doubt as far as these purists are concerned is in some way ignored even more than they might have been if they were on the right side of the fence, it is as if these purists don't actually exist inside the four corners of the fence, and so most of the purists end up just leaving, but some stay inside our area in the belief that if the area exists, if signals recommence and continue to be given, if validity is underpinned and feedback granted then there must be - must there not - a value and a truth in what goes on in our fenced-off land, a value in the work of the fence-keepers, and surmounting the fence or pushing through it although not difficult is still a  decisive effort-heavy feat, an effort imbued with certainty, the exact type of certainty wanting in the purists within the space.

I have spent years trying to leave the space but I am conflicted. I have spent years -  and the years  drone past; and I'm still inside protected and safe, but I am hating it and I am suffocating and there's a stench but I can't leave. Take this as a plea then to the fence-keepers to let me out. Take this as an admission of failure, as a defeat.  It might require something more than to be left alone as I scramble inelegantly over, it might require something more than the recent wasteland of signals I have personally experienced, but I don't know what. And even if I were removed, which I have never known to happen, I would probably find my way back and no one would know.