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 ^{(it's beta!)}

Only follow the material is what is to be learned in this life; if your woman or your friends or your children leave, they are to be blessed with your love and your hopes and your well wishes, not to be chased after like so many dollars lost to habit and so many gone saints' medals and so many lost manuscripts. I will follow my car across this nation; when Cate left, I would not even follow her footsteps out the door. If she is to be gone, gone of her own will, that is her choice to be made, and any word I say would be marks against a fate pre-decided, words to keep her on my whim before I realize that if she leaves now, she will leave again, or I will, and there is no caring in holding her back.

Sitting in this café next to the Charm City Art Space, I'm wondering where it all went wrong. A back room set up for smokers and I smoke, double sided glass mirrors keeping secrecy, writing letters home to a PO Box that I will read later, memoirs of a life I am finally leading. When Cate left, all that was left was the scent of the candles she had let smolder in the apartment, and they smelled only like her perfume, and so I left, with no home of mine to go home to, and I sleep on the couches of old friends and family, making my way to no where and waiting sometimes for death to come for me. I lost my home, and so I will search for home somewhere in this world.

Tonight I sleep at my grandmother's, her old age leaving her weak and at a loss of hearing; this will be my third and last night, staying on the same couch I used to sleep on each summer when I lived with her, away from family infighting and yelling and feeling truly safe a half hour away in the middle of the place I knew as my first home, and so I seek refuge now here, and I have yet to find it. I have taken to tending to the garden my father planted, I have taken to cooking breakfast each morning, I have taken to polishing the hard wood floors. I slipped and fell and cut my cheek open on the dining room table. It was my own fault and I realize that and I laid carpet so she wouldn't fall either.

A girl is crying across the way, on a bench outside the window. She is wearing a scarf and a checkered jacket. Her hair is auburn. I want to say something, but I don't; I am not that man. In the bathroom I roll my sleeves up and wash my face with hot water, running my hands across the planes that have formed, the double chin hid by a beard, the laugh lines and wrinkles that seem all too out of place now. Next to the last marks of childhood acne scars, seeing the marks of age is all too broken, and I press my palms to my eyes and hope I will be back in Cate's arms when it ends.

Cigarette left in the ash tray, I walk outside, sleeves still rolled tight, pack in there like my grandfather did in all the pictures; I walk beside the girl, stand still, and cast my eyes down on her. Her blush has become all smeared. I walk into the street, intending to cross, look into the sky, and complete the walk. Children run by, as does a flustered mother or aunt, I walk in the opposite direction past parking meters and badly marked parallel parking spaces that would do better in a historic college town than here.

Avoiding cracks, avoiding homeless save a man I have become a patron of who wears a jacket I have become enamored with whose cup I drop a few dollars in each day, avoiding all that could harm me or anyone else, I walk home. The sun has reached its dominion, and there will be no rise or fall for hours to come, and there hasn't been either in the same time, and I walk toward the noon.

Coffee shops line each block, some glaring, some subtle, some home grown and some truly commercial. I try to avoid them, and I worry that my old purity has been lost among all this. The streets are not bustling and I keep a clear path, I watch the old guard shuffle through their old haunts, now marked by age and by canes and by clothes not fit to be worn, and I remember some of their faces from ages ago; men who ran bakeries, women who ran salons; I remember sitting in Cheryl's attic while my grandmother and her friends got their hair cut in the living room below and I read old magazines until I was brought down by Cheryl's warm hand and my grandmother would walk me to her old Escort and buckle me into the too tight back seat, too tight even at six. Cheryl was a lost soul even then, a woman talked about by all women, rumors abounding concerning how husband's infidelity and her own, the rumors of a terminal sickness, nothing clicking in my mind until puberty when it all became clear, and before I could view Cheryl again, having outgrown the attic and able to be left home, she had passed out of this world. Her husband attended the funeral, giving a beautiful eulogy, sitting next to the woman he had found in her place. My grandmother cried, as did all the other women. I forget why my parents weren't there, except maybe they didn't know her, or only knew her as the abomination rumors and small talk led her to be. She was always warm to me.

Birds nest on each power line, sitting on the black threads that slice through the sky and the faded yellow poles reaching to the heavens, spikes jutting out where men dared to climb. Books facilitated by childhood here; books about birds like these, encyclopedias intermingled with Hardy Boys and the old classics; once we found a copy of Kerouac's On The Road that belonged to my grandfather before he passed, and it was truly a find, the most modern antique existent in that home. I read it then and I didn't understand; I could read it now and I wouldn't understand. I have never felt that passion, and my experiences on the road only greet me with the familiar, with the sense that this world, for as different as each town and each person and each culture is, is wholly the same place everywhere. The birds nest on every line.

Home now my grandmother watches the news at one with the volume knob turned all the way clockwise; I kiss her on the cheek and talk about her day. She has been here all day. She tells me a story about my grandfather, a story that never truly happened, and was actually about my father; a story of how, unsure of how his life would unfold, a man took refuge in steady work, and found a peace in the tedium, and I asked if she meant my father, and she said, no, I mean pop pop. One word less and it'd be the same as my father, one word less and it'd be the same as her father.

We watch television together until night falls. She crawls to bed at seven. I cook a dinner of bacon, toast, lettuce and tomato, eat it slowly and taking pleasure in each bite, and look at the blue ceiling, marked by water stains from plumbing accidents years ago. They almost look like clouds. I leave tomorrow, and I will find a home somewhere. This may be it, but this is only the past. Out on the streets, for as broken as that present seems, is where the present is, and tomorrow I begin anew.