Exercise #6 (Christie)

I watch myself in the windows as I walk. I track my bent head, eyes cast sidelong across the storefronts, in the reflections of a passing bus, in puddle murk. I see myself, and also other things. Clouds dancing. Strangers. Sometimes, I stop and pretend to examine something for sale. Something with a price. My pockets are full of the change I've collected along the way. I judge the weight of it, the soft jangle in my hand down to the last dime. Never enough.

The cracks in the sidewalk open up as the weather turns. Break your mother's back, break your mother's back. Mud, gravel, sometimes bitter greens fighting through the concrete. I imagine the ground beneath those heavy, broken slabs. Damp and wormed. Crushed beneath all of these feet, wheels, and the iron sky. What would it look like, this street? Without the rivers of stone and traffic? I haunt construction sites, longing to see them undone, torn back to let the earth breath. But they are quickly recovered. Dammed. Reshaped to make way for sandwich shops and uneven sidewalks.

I have my places. The wide stone doorway of the book shop, dark wooden double doors. A rusted orange bench near the Coin-King Laundry (where loose change goes to die). Under a tree at the cemetery gate. I have been taught that there is an art in this that must be respected. A wandering that is not wandering at all, but a slow movement, deliberate, purposeful. I check my reflection and wonder what they must think of me, the people who drop coins into a blue felt hat I found in the train station. A person without people. A shadow thing, part of the street. They offer me sandwiches, bottles of water. Once, an umbrella. As if the rain were the problem. I think of the space under my mother's porch, where there is still a sleeping bag I took from someone's unlocked garage.

There are still some things. I still have the tube of hand lotion from the hotel. It smells like nothing but clean. It tastes clean and nourishing, everything that the place under my mother's porch is not. When it is dark, the clean, waxen residue of the lotion on my lips reminds me of all the things I have left behind. The mason jar full of dollars forgotten in a Denny's bathroom. The small silver ring I threw into the Columbia river, too small. The blue and black and green tarps, blown away. Shoelaces. A mewling tabby kitten with one good eye. A tight curl of newspaper taken while I slept. Bus fare. Sunglasses. The way my mother's hair looked when she first woke. Breakfast. I keep the lotion tucked into the double layer of my left sock. The soft indention it makes in the puttied skin of my calf doesn't show in the windows. The taste of it on my lips doesn't show. Only the bent head, walking slowly, to somewhere.