Excerpt:

As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to find places to hide. The purely physical aspect; the fact that you are larger (in many cases, very much larger) than you used to be, prevents you from reveling in your oldest places, the ones you found when you were young and running away was almost acceptable. Sometimes you might still fit into these spots, but somehow, you don’t feel as safe as you used to. Your problems never exactly went away before, you knew that, but they used to disappear…at least a little bit even if only for a short time. They don’t anymore—they’re always there—it has gotten so much harder than it used to be to find a place to push them under the surface, if only for a little while. I’ve forgotten half of my old hiding spots. I know they existed, if only because I was never good at coping as a child, but I search and search and they seem to have disappeared entirely.

These days I try to avoid looking for [new] hiding places, I seek instead to figure out what exactly makes a place suitable for hiding. What are the qualities an area must have? What feelings must they evoke in the (for lack of a better term) hider? How much (if any) extra space can there be? Do other people make a hiding spot feel better or worse? What happens if the perfect hiding spot is suddenly erased from someone’s life? And how is someone capable of forgetting their own favorite childhood spaces?