Young Writers Society

An ever-changing story, closer to a ramble, something broken, something honest, something weird: Naked Windows is the narrative of Rhys Hartman, community, and in a way, myself; a story about recovery, about being a twenty-something, about sorrow, mental illness, love and life and loss; about growing up before growing old, about purpose, about finding out who you are; it is about sex and coffee, drugs and way too many cigarettes.

It is a story straight from the marrows of my bones, everything I've wanted to say but could never quite find the words; it is, like myself, forever under revision; it lives and dies and breathes just as I do. It is everything I have ever been myself, and everything else I wish I could be.

And, no matter what, it is me, and it is mine.

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road