How do you write yourself a letter when you haven’t spoken plainly in years? You lean against rusty signposts and sigh and get stared at. You walk around begging and sitting on wet sidewalks with transparent clothes. The street becomes sort of like a sea, and I become sort of like a bag lady, drifting my garbage on the waves. I brought someone else’s words for safekeeping, or maybe just in case. Breaking glass and walking out the front door are often the same thing, only I tend to forget when the axe is in my hand.

I went to the street to get away from the houses, and they went to the houses to get away from the street. But they secluded, I expanded. From this street you can reach all others; from one house, to enter even just one other proves difficult with the crossing of stars. Beer bottles camouflage the landscape, but I blend in well. I know the secret ways of crushed birds in sidewalks and butterflies alighting in the street. Everywhere there is machinery, and everywhere it is known to be unnecessary, and embraced. The breeze over sod-sprayed land is the breeze over the Queen Anne’s Lace of the sidewalk cracks, flowers for the funerals of the broken backs of mothers, and of the single feather divided from the flock.

Start watching for turning faces. I am given electrical guidance. Let them think I am on copious drugs. This electric fencepost pointed me out and I lived in fear of its messages, dubious. The skeptic suffers when birds turn their wings to reveal another color. Maybe hallucinogens were forgotten in their non-quest for truth. Six thousand reasons to be terrified, and all of them assuaged with melting ice cream. In the country where we are always waiting, we order the same flavor six thousand times and anticipate it to be different. Disappointment tastes sweeter than silk.

I walk the public road, through back gates and driveways and the secrets of landscapes. All paths are made of people, although some are of the lonely nights. All paths are meant to be walked on. There will always be chance encounters that are never really chance, and for this we can deem ourselves fortunate. There are mushrooms growing in the old schoolyard, and names are scrawled on rocks in the wall, and everywhere there are giant birds. They are fierce without malice, and they have great black wings. They are not easily startled, but they are easily driven away.

You are always wondering if there are people crossing the street at the sound of your name. They do, but the street carries echos like a soldier after war, ringing and ringing again. I could fill pages and pages with the names of events and of shadows, of curbs I had sat on to think and only felt the sting of grass too long kept captive.

“I’ve been walking,” she said, “and sledding down long asphalt hills with my eyes.” Her audience merely stared, and occasionally laughed, as if their voices had to somehow loose the questions they would not say. A thousand ants gathering on a a paper plate, or a girl wandering in an empty patch of everywhere, longing for the taste of strawberry gum, but only being awarded with the sights of empty wrappers, and of other walkers, and the sound of oncoming cars.

It is probably for the best that I am only partially plugged in. So this is what it’s like to be soaked in sweat without the scent of sex, and with the soft breeze of Outside. Watching people turn around in someone’s driveway, and raise the little flag on the mailbox... I realize there are some facets of existence I will never fully understand through immersion. A beautiful car stuffed with old paper like a pair of stored shoes. I do not know where all of these roads go. The little sparrows do not mind, and the large birds are listening to a splashing far away. I want to climb these trees, but some sense of ownership stops me. As always. As often. As sometimes.

After a certain point you can’t merely turn around and go back. You have to find a different route home, if you get back to that old one at all. Out here it smells like both machines and greenery, and I want to douse myself in the sidewalks. I forgot how to care for numbers, left them untended until they grew wild, and now I fight their long-mutated descendants.

I don’t want to do things merely because I can, but merely because I want to. The dreamers in my family tend to be mistaken when they think bees are dead. Bicycle wheels mark time while I struggle, briefly, before giving up and moving on, to remember the name of a long-forgotten purple flower.

You went down the road you thought you knew, scolding yourself for your lack of adventure, only to prove yourself wrong. You occasionally forget why you wondered what they thought, and wonder if this means you’re running out of steam. So this is the place you saw only at night. During the day domesticated cats stare you down for miles, and sea horses and beer bottles grin at you from behind morose orange fences. You vaguely remember falling in love on one of these roads, and getting drunk on the next to forget it. Styrofoam breaks into little white beads to replace the petals of dead daisies, and new thoughts chip off to replace the gaps in all old memory.

I’ve been walking for a long way, and my steps are bound together with green twine, the sticks caught in the power lines, and the sound of bugs enamored with my earlobes. Saying “things only rhyme when you don’t want them to” is more useful, perhaps, than saying “thing don’t rhyme when you want them to.”