Pastel Path to Nowhere In Particular

There is a certain anticipation before the walk. The thirty-five minute train ride. And the walk doesn’t start immediately after stepping onto the platform or even exiting the stop. As soon as I cross the busy street of Ashland, my body relaxes, my breathing eases, however, my feet are the first to recognize it. I wear thin sneakers- ten dollars- worn to the cardboard for this very purpose; to feel the sidewalk against my feet. Today, it is cold, a cold I can feel through thin, mismatched socks, soothing the pads of my feet. I recall warm-rain summers, barefoot through puddles, smashing dirt to mud between my toes, scooping fist-fulls, attempting to remove the nature from it, picking out rocks and twigs and worms, then smearing it over the barks of trees, making stick people and stick dogs. I wear thin shoes to feel the earth.

And on my walk, I am looking down. I know the look of the gated homes flanking both sides of me, I know the deep blue of the sky over-head, how it fades to white near the horizon. I know the naked branches of the leafed trees, recall the sharpness of the needles of the pines and how they shed over the carpet during Christmases. I’d plop down on the kitchen floor to pull them from the soles of my feet. Then my mom bought an artificial pine.

Today, the sidewalk is what interests me, its many segmented parts. Covered in gum. Looks like pigeon shit. Looks like globs of hawked phlegm. These circles cracked like the concrete around them, faded greens and reds and blues and pinks. A pastel path to nowhere in particular- it all depends on where you’re going. Following this scavenger hunt of gum wrappers, cigarette butts- both gold and white- Kleenex, CTA passes, receipts; the unnecessary papers that fall from pockets, aren’t worth bending down to retrieve.

There are no cracked, faded phlegm balls coating the sidewalk in front of the Baptist church that doubles as a pre-school during the week, that advertises ENGLISH services at 9, ESPANOL services at 10, and JAPANESE services at 11, because the Japanese congregation is more likely than the Hispanics to recognize the English name of their language. Or they don’t make Japanese letters for those removable letter boards, like having to use ‘v’s when you run out of ‘u’s. And I wonder how big that Japanese congregation really is.

I don’t even look up when people pass, move only when I see their shoes: black and red sporty high-top sneakers, modest black clunky clogs, brown scuffed rounded-toed boots. I don’t know what their faces look like, but I can imagine the boy in the black and red high-tops, his bright yellow tee with neon lettering, his ball cap, the brim perfectly flat, tilted upward slightly, the metallic sticker still attached. I can see a woman in tapered black slacks, black suit jacket a little too loose to be intimidating, her thin straight blonde hair chopped right at the shoulder all the way around her head. I can see a scruffy man wearing a stocking cap, a heavy tan jacket, tan leather gloves, his jeans dusty with a few splotches of paint here and there, and wide blue eyes set into the leather of his skin and the bristles of his facial hair.