Great Expectations

I am headed to the Midwest for fifteen days, and if it doesn't snow (just a little!), I am gonna cry (just a little).

Other Places

Even though there are places like Baltimore and places like Cleveland and places like Chicago, which are far better and far away and have sidewalks, for one thing, I am going to stay. Those places, other places, ask for things I don't have, and things I'm in no position to give. I take and I take and I take. 

Four Years

The first time I ran away, I thought I was going to France, and I cut my bangs crookedly like I did last week. I got them evened out in Chicago, instead.


Collage (with Runaways) by Aly R., 2008

Unsolicited Advice

While a natural setting is generally recommended for the ease of tensions physical and mental (by myself and a great many others), there are certain states that seem desperate for pavement and glass, and do not ask much of the architecture. There are states, I think, of anxiety and restlessness that maybe you can sweat out, if you walk in circles long enough around a half-dozen city blocks. Even if it isn't late July in Baltimore, if you walk long enough, you will at some point open a door and go inside somewhere, or get on a train, and then you will peel off every sweaty layer that you piled on that February morning-- taking the frenzy with it.

If you do that, in a city where you don't live, and then you rinse it all off and go to bed and wake up the next morning and cut your hair and eat a doughnut (but probably only if you do all of that), you might have a chance of getting rid of whatever mania swelled inside of you, and possessed you to skip town in the first place. If you do those things, you can expect another year and a half to two years before you start feeling that way again, and then you might be lucky, because it might be summertime, and you won't have to walk as long or as far before you've sweat everything out.