Houses in the rain - how can I express it? Places one could never inhabit. Or places one could inhabit, but only as a different person. They are attractive houses, but there is also something remote about them. Perhaps attractive because they are remote, perhaps remote because they are beautiful and therefore, in a certain sense, unposessable. Could the break be made, I can't imagine that anyone who knew me from elsewhere could know me from here, although assuredly I know there would be others about me. Instead, it would be as if one life had slipped into another. Perhaps that's what they are offering - a new and more compelling meaning, to slip under my skin.

It all reminds me of a suburb of Auckland I drove through by accident once, taking the wrong turning off the expressway. It was very quiet and secluded, with roads of houses just like this - capable of supporting any life, but not revealing overmuch about themselves until that impossible day when I should address them with resolution for a personal inspection. As if with their beauty also came a pride, a reticience. As if someone had been disappointed in the past. As if they themselves had been disappointed by someone, in the past. They're waiting for me to embrace them, passionlessly, without perturbation. But I cannot stop; I am driving in a car; there are others behind me who know where they want to go, and I must go on passing these houses, now wishing that they would end. There is no place to pull over; all the parking spaces are taken, and still the houses stream by, as though unwilling to give up their opportunity. It's a relief when finally I get to some place I never meant to go - a place where no one else seems to want to go either, so the traffic behind me has ceased. But the houses have ceased too; in my anxiety I made too many subtle turns too quickly, striving to throw off my pursuit. Who knows how to get back to the place I came from, or whether it could ever happen without another centipede of cars following me, hands ready to sound their horns, wanting me to get quickly to wherever it is they suppose I must be going, so that they, in turn, can pass unobstructed to their own destinations, which I don't even care to imagine.

Maybe all of them are pursued by other cars, the last forced along by some invisible car, so that none of them ever arrive at the places they wanted to arrive. Maybe the only reason there was so much congestion on the roads was that all of us were admiring those houses, all of us wanting to stop and start new lives within them. But in our humility we felt obliged to move along, not realising that our own motion drove others ahead in despite of themselves, and so none of us ever reached our goal, except that last, invisible car - something half-way between a conscience and a fate, inspired by our anxiety and created for the sole purpose of subverting our desires.