He spent a Sunday with scissors, a glue stick and four back issues of a magazine his mother had left behind, and by evening the board held a boat, a marble kitchen island, a stranger's obliques and the word CLARITY cut from a mattress advertisement. He hung it facing the bed. He photographed it twice and looked at the photograph on the train.

That was fourteen months ago. The meal-prep containers are still in their plastic sleeve; the running shoes went back in the box after one lap of the block. Twice now he has taken the board down and built a better one, with cleaner spacing. The building is the part that works, and he has become genuinely skilled at it.