Walking and Standing Still

We were walking to the CVS on Hollister Avenue. Well, we were biking, only I had left my bike alone and away somewhere. So we were walking, slow and weaving and straight along the ticker-tape bisecting the road. Turn right on Sabado; keep one eye open and the scanners on. Only this time the scanners were quiet and that open eye was looking for a sweet blue house nestled between the dry earth and the sky to match.

Hang a left on Fortuna. This is as rural as the city gets...suburbia with a skeletal schoolbus in a dead end or driveway--some long grass, a dirt bike path; probably families living here.

We took a wrong turn and I got thirsty in the dust. Doubling back and fitting my feet in your footprints. The air felt cool but the sunlight was heavy. I thought about the secret we had uncovered: my first secret in this new place. Suddenly didn’t feel so public, so developed and known anymore. I have always been so starving for the secrets of a place--the holes in the fence and that wind-hollowed, twisting metal skeleton out in the woods. The places where you fall through the floorboards and might not ever get back to because no one had ought to tell about them to anyone else.

Well, what about that huge slab of stone in the sun--always in the sun for me--about forty minutes straight up from the fourth floor? It doesn’t feel quite like the one I remember, on not-my-property and in the woods and hidden away from the quarries. A great stack of cut limestone piled up between the trees, out of nowhere and out of place. If you leave your things in the underbrush, you can scramble to the flat tilted top and stay until the sun goes cold, or until you’ve seen enough of the stars. Who would ever think to find that strange monument? But I went back and it remained.

My bike clicked across the yard and then I was sliding in front of the lethargic cars that were the kind that we had in the city. The gears ate my pant-leg, certainly hoping for one last bite of skin, but not getting any. I got what I paid for at CVS. Peeled clam shell off of cardboard off of another clamshell and handed it off to you. Put some powdered sugar in the fridge and failed to hide any surprises from her.

The laundry--crunched up against the brick wall, gathering wet and threatening to spread across her desk--hid crunched in its corner. I slipped into my unwashed sheets, wrung out and forgetting the secret I found. It wasn’t a very good one.