Only the Echoes

I

The city woke before I did. By the time I reached the sidewalk it was already talking to itself.

The people? They were talking at me. Men argued over nothing that would matter tomorrow. A woman laughed into the wind, the way some ladies do. A bus sighed at the curb and pulled away before anyone could change their mind. Voices came and went like traffic. I heard them, but they never settled into meaning. They passed over me the way weather passes over water.

I don’t hear a word they’re saying. Only the echoes of my mind.

People looked as they always do in a city, long enough to place you, not long enough to know you. Faces blurred together until only their eyes remained. Even those became shadows after a while. Only the shadows of their eyes.

Hey, I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!

The cabbie threw up a hand, half apology, half annoyance, and rolled on. The street swallowed the moment as if it had happened a thousand times before. It had.

I kept walking.

II

The farther the bus went, the less the city seemed to expect of me. Buildings gave way to open sky. The rain came first, hard enough to wash the dust from the road; then the sun broke through as though the two had made a private agreement.

The wind shifted out of the northeast and carried the smell of places I had never seen. By afternoon it had softened into something warm that came off the water. The sea lay ahead, bright and restless. A child stooped, found a flat stone, and sent it skipping across the surface. Each touch was brief. Each one was enough to carry it a little farther before it disappeared.

That seemed as good a way as any to travel. Banking off of the northeast winds. Sailing on summer breeze. Skipping over the ocean like that stone.

By evening the voices were only a murmur behind me. Maybe they were still talking. Maybe they always would. It no longer felt important to know what they were saying. The road stretched on into the last of the light, and I followed it with nothing in my pockets except a feeling that somewhere ahead there would be a place where the weather suits my clothes.

(P.S. Just wish the gigolo in the cowboy getup would stop following me around. It’s giving me the creeps.)