It was a battle to be himself at work, so that when he got home he escaped by taking his focus off himself and putting it completely on her.  It took a late-night walk months hence to notice that he had rare opportunities left at work or home to feel himself being himself.  It was after all no more than a feeling of himself that he sought, not a knowing; knowing himself had never been worth the effort to create a knowable self.  Still, he felt trapped in a sensation that a self was his right to be and feel and fight for.  Why he then jumped into the traffic circle and dodged cars to get to the center island did not become clear to him till he got to the lone oak tree that spread out and dominated the circle island.  Just to feel its bark was feeling something unlike anything.  He roughened up his hands against it, climbed the oak, swung off it, hopped branch to branch, his breath sounding as it wouldn’t otherwise, short and deep with slight arrests between — the breath, he at long last recognized, of he being relaxed being with himself.