Here’s a room, a ballroom.

It is called “Ballroom A.”

Ballroom A is located in a hotel at the edge of the Los Angeles International Airport.

Look at Ballroom A.

There’s nothing to it, right? Just that trapezoid of light, that stain on the carpet, those patterned curtains, the red velvet couch, those sliding glass doors that open onto a balcony that is not really a balcony at all.

If you are very still, in Ballroom A, if you are very quiet, you can feel the airplanes, the shudder of them as they take off and go up and away, elsewhere. You can hear the airplanes sing their song of anywhere but here, anywhere but here. Everything in this room—the couch, the carpet, the curtains, the light switch, the sliding glass doors to nowhere—knows that song. And every object sings it: Anywhere but here anywhere but here anywhere but here.

Ballroom A is a room of want. It is a room of elsewhere.

I love its emptiness and desperation, its whiff of impossible dreams; at night, I close my eyes and work to populate it.

Look, there’s a mouse who has come out from behind the curtain in Ballroom A. She has found a crumb of cracker with a morsel of goat cheese still attached to it. She stands on her hind legs and eats her treasure slowly and looks out the sliding glass doors and into the dark world and marvels over the moon hanging low in the sky. What light is that? the mouse wonders. And who put it there?

And there is a cleaning woman named Estrelle Neveda who is vacuuming the carpet of Ballroom A with an ancient Hoover. Estrelle Neveda is so tired that she actually falls asleep as she vacuums. She sleeps and she dreams of a tree that was in the front yard of the house where she was born. In her dream, all of the branches of the tree are hung with something bright and round. They are medals; they are for a job well done. They are for her. Each medal says “Good job, Estrella.” They misspelled her name, but so what? There are so many medals; and they are so bright.

Here is a boy who has run away from home. We won’t say why. We only know that he spends the night on the red couch in Ballroom A; and that when he wakes up, there is sunlight everywhere. The boy gets off the couch and opens the sliding glass doors and steps out onto the small strip of cement that is not a balcony. And from there, from that vantage point, he can see the planes taking off, leaving. He raises his hand to them. He stands on the strip of cement, and again and again, he blesses each plane, calls out to it, as it lifts up and away. “Here,” says the boy, “I’m here.”