Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

Cover me over, bundle me up, step in front and crowd me out. The light still shines through the window shades, the curtains at half mast, but the leaves are still falling regardless of who watches the leaves fall. I’m lost on the streets, they join and they part ways, they run smooth and over divots that jostle and disturb. The  are where we belong on days like these. The streets are where the feet pound and hunt like carnivorous paws. Stop. Adjust. Pivot. Begin again. The craggy cement becomes smooth polished mill stones, or weathered timber planks and you notice, but at the same time you walk on with only a slightly adjusted pace, a mere stumble before you forget what surface you are on.

Don’t forget. Absorb as you go. This is even, this is slanted. Every hill you walk or curb you stumble on and you will adjust your path even a fraction of a degree. My angle is your angle, just as his is hers, or his is his. We walk, yet avoid each others angles because we avoid the continuity of our closeness. I see you coming from the distance, on track with me and our footfalls match to an intersection where we cross. I slow, I bob, I weave. Yet you do the same. We cross anyways. With downcast eyes and worried hands we pull a cellphone or a watch, perhaps even blow a speck of lint from our fingertips. All to avoid what cannot be avoided. I know and you know that we crossed paths. I know and you know that we both are aware of each other and we both consciously attempted to separate.

The awkward and sheepish smiles, the shrugged shoulders or wave to an invisible friend all to distract and distance, to cast our shadows in a different path although that intersection has already been planned, has already grabbed hold of two complete strangers and given them knowledge of one another, power over the meeting.

They are cobblestones and tiles, crosswalks and compacted dirt trails. We may roll or skip, hold hands or run alone, but we are always on track to meet someone on our angle, someone with labored breathing or laughter, maybe asthma or a booming guffaw. Challenge your angles. Don’t avoid them; they can’t be avoided. You just momentarily step into another path, another angle that creates conflict, though it is brief. Next time you are on the same path stand tall, pull out your earbuds and fully acknowledge your connectedness in time and space and realize every action that placed you both on that same path. Oh the chances. In those moments of meeting you are the polished penny heads-up. You are the winning scratch ticket of the cosmos.