We weren’t the kind if people that they looked in the eye as they walked down the street. They found something else to occupy their gaze. Anything other than our wore, grimy faces.



I knew if I was them, I would do the same thing. Avoid eye contact, dig my hands into my pockets, pretend to be fascinated with anything else other than the dirty children’s faces. But I wasn’t them, I wasn’t walking on their side of the street. I was walking next to her. On my side. Playing a game of trying to make them look me in the eye. They never did, so I was losing.



She avoided their eyes just as they avoided hers. We stayed silent as we slide through the mindless people walking down the street, ignoring us the best they could. Suddenly she cut through an alleyway between two stores, and I felt a little more “in place” as we cut by dumpsters over strewn with garbage, and dirty clothing.


We were almost there. She didn’t say anything, but she began moving quicker, turning faster and leading me deeper into the maze of alleyways behind the system of stores. She abruptly stopped. Over her head I could see open air and an expanse of land stuck on the back of an untraveled highway. We walked into the emptiness, and crossed the road without having to stop. No people had bothered to come back here in what seemed like years. Even if an individual’s business meeting or an acquaintance’s manor was established in this obscure part of town, forcing them to drive by this place, they would avoid eye contact just like they had when we walked by. They would find anything else to look at other than the tops of the black head stones barely visible over the rock walls that ominously lined the road. This unloved place might as well have been our home.



Ivy slide its way up a big sign that hadn’t been cleaned in months, and was almost illegible. She didn’t pause for a second to make sure that we were in the right place, she just kept walking. The dirt path that we wandered along, had shadowed head stones lining it. They stood like darkened soldiers guarding some unseen treasure, looming more and more over us as we went deeper and deeper on the forgotten path. I thought that we had gone all the way through and were at the other end of the graveyard, when suddenly she sharply turned off the path and stepped into the weed ridden grass. I followed, sliding around the head stones the path didn’t go by, the ones whose families had abandoned them. The forgotten dead so distracted me I almost didn’t notice that she had stopped in front of me. I stopped short of almost bumping into her. Peering over her head I saw it. A little gravestone that was almost invisible it was so covered in ivy and weeds.



She dropped down to her knees in front of it, her static full hair floating around her head, making her look like a funny little vagabond angel. Even though I could only see the back of her head, I knew that as she began to pull the weeds from the headstone, she was silently crying. I bent down next to her, and helped remove the twisty dead plants. I wiped the stone off with the corner of my shirt so the name was legible. Then we sat, her head down, hands politely folded in her lap.



On that unknown stretch of road, in that untraveled little graveyard, on that sad grave, we stayed lost in memories of a man we never knew. And as we sat there in a cemetery whose map had been lost, and placement had been all but remembered, I felt a little less forgotten.







Lying under an underpass is a lot like lying under a concert hall during a performance, but the orchestra’s musicians have broken all their fingers and the maestro bumped his head. There was still music it was just hard to hear over all the miscalculated notes. The underpasses were where I spent many of my afternoons, in a half daze, listening to the stream of cars file by, was the sleeping place of many runaways and homeless. Too poor or too scared to sleep anywhere else. That is where I happened to be on a late afternoon during the colder months, watching the white freckles begin to appear in the almost night sky. But that after noon my dreaming was cancelled, by a loud cacophony of car horns, the crescendo in my vexatious concert. Having my daze firmly broken I rose to my feet to see what had the daily car cladded commuters in such a fuss. What my gaze happened upon was not at all what I had expected.


She stood in the middle of road tangled hair flying across her face, arms tightly wrapped around herself as car after car honked and then went around her. I was moving toward the highway before I had even definitively decided I wanted to help. I waved my hands at her, trying to get her attention. Maybe if she realized where she was she could get out of the middle of the road. But she didn’t even look up. I felt panic. I didn’t know her, not her name nor who she was, or what aliment caused her to wander into the middle of a busy street, but I felt a sense of fear climbing up my spine. I was suddenly running across the busy street, again without my own full consent, ignoring honks, and muffled yells of angry drivers, I sprinted across the road, grabbed the edge of her cheap black windbreaker and half dragged half pulled her to the other side, of the busy road.



We landed hard on the asphalt, my hands scraping on the black grain. Another volley of beeping and swearing came from the cars. It took me a second to catch my breathe. I turned to the girl I just dragged from the middle of the road, not surprised to find a blank stare across her face. But the dazed look wasn’t what caught my attention. There was much more to look at than the lack of expression on her face. A few brown infectious cuts, that obviously hadn’t been treated, gashed their way across her nose and part of her lips. Blotchy bruises encircled her eyes, like coffee spilled on a chaotic, mis-charted road map. And her eyes……matched the color of the bumpy asphalt below us, but blacker and emptier.


She moved so suddenly it caught me off guard. She was up, and gliding away before I even had time to say anything. I got up and followed her; again not really mentally making the choice. I momentarily glanced at my bag, back across the highway, where I had been daydreaming, but I kept going without thinking twice about turning around.



Chasing her along the dirty road I was surprised how far she had gotten in such a small amount of time. She was already almost out of the overhead maze of highways above us. But she wasn’t heading for the city. No, she was walking in the absolute opposite direction, toward the empty plains outside of town.



Finally, just as the afternoon light cascaded down onto her face, as she walked out of the over pass, I caught her. Grabbing the back of her windbreaker I attempted to pull her back. She glared at me, with those black eyes, and swatted my hand away.
I opened my mouth to say something, but with no idea of even where to begin, I stayed silent. Instead of saying anything I just followed her. Not exactly sure where we were going or even why, and not bothering to ask, I trailed a few meters behind her as we wandered along the edge of the highway, till barely the tip of the sun’s rays were showing. As the sun had gotten closer and closer to dipping behind the Earth’s horizon, fewer and fewer cars passed us. When the last mini-van finally puttered by, she stopped, and sat down by the highway, staring across the flat expanse of land. It was almost completely dark out now.



I sat down next to her and tried to look off past the highway, to see what it was she was staring at so contently. But all I saw was the city’s silhouette in the fading light. I glanced at her and noticed a black spot on the edge of her hand. It was barely visible in the oncoming darkness, but I was able to make out a little inked bird trying to escape the wrinkles of her palm. Though I was not exactly sure, I decided it was some sort of nightingale, and because we had not bothered to exchange personal identities, I also came to the conclusion that from now on, as long as I trailed behind her to where it was we were off to, she would be like the bird trapped on her skin. Gale.














Early in the morning, I woke up on the side of the highway. This of course was not an unusually place for me to open my eyes too. After a while I had gotten use to sleeping outside and to waking up in odd places. Gale was up as well, watching the sun rise. As light flowed over us, I was able to see her face again. The infectious cuts and bruise seemed to have gotten better, and changed to a lighter color.



Without even looking at me, she stood, stretched and began walking in the direction we had been heading yesterday. I was quick to follow, jogging to catch up, then decidedly walking right next to her instead of behind her.



The further away we got from the city the emptier the world seemed to get. The four lane highway narrowed down to two, and the shadows of the city just became black marks in the distance. Now it was just a yellowed field that went stretching out to the ends of the Earth.


As we became drowned in silence, there was an odd beauty that I began to notice as we got closer to our destination. A sort of organization befell the openness. All the chaotic sounds that had inhabited the city, either left our ears, or fell into a set placement that they were always meant to be in. The universe was so still and quiet that I could have walked with my eyes close and not been disturbed. And I knew why it was like that. It was because of Gale. The silence that had earlier just seemed to surround her had soaked into the surrounding land and taken its tongue. She was the cause of this, and maybe that’s why I had followed her this far, and planned to continue with her.



I didn’t realize that that day was almost over till the bottom of the sun was touching the tops of the grass stocks again. Though it felt like minutes, we must have walked for hours in her silence, but this illusion had only lasted for a little while. As the sun began to set, light started flickering in the distance.


I was not surprised to find that even when blackness smeared over the azure sky we kept walking through the dark to reach the glimmering yellow lights that lay in whatever was ahead. It was odd that when I was walking next to Gale in the cold quiet, I didn’t feel any exhaustion at all, as soon as I feel back a pace or forward one, my legs would twitch and shake, and I felt like falling down right in that spot to sleep, but then I would step back into her bubble and feel nothing. Feel numb. As if a cold chill caused by her, keep the sleep at
bay.



The night passed much like the day, without my realization of its passing. Before I even knew it the sun was again rising in the eastern corner of the world, and Gale and I had finally reached the lights that we had seen last night.



The outskirts of the city roads were shaded with up stores that had brown paint peeling off the sides. If we hadn’t had seen the occasional early morning commuter I would have thought it was a ghost town. But as we went further down the road, more stores began to line the street, more people and cars began coming and going, till all the sounds twisted together to make the chaotic noises I had only had freedom from in the middle of nowhere.


Suddenly people were crowding the sidewalks, and I was having trouble not falling into the road. I keep trying to move forward against the people but it wasn’t just people anymore. It was something else that seemed to be suffocating me. The noises, smashing against my ears, of the bells ringing to open stores, cars honking at other cars, people yelling at other people, colors twisting against each other in a unset quilt of unnatural shades, reds and pinks and purples all screaming at each other for their spot on a woman’s coat, people shoving against me, men breathing coffee breathe in my face, women shoving lipstick on their faces while on a cell phone, and I was falling, falling off the edge of the sidewalk into the black road.



A hand caught mine just before I was about to topple over into the road, and pulled me back onto the sidewalk. I was next to Gale, with our fingers intertwined she looked up at a wall in front of us. There suddenly seemed like a lot fewer people walking by. I tightened my grip on her hand and followed her gaze upward to the wall. It was beautiful. The mosaic that glittered above us swirled with interconnected wave of indigo's, greens, yellows and reds that each brought forth a different emotion, a different memory that may have not even belonged to me. On that wall in the center of the city, the most unlikely place in the world, I saw the sunset, the sunrise, the ocean, the forest, the desert. Lives of people I had never known, lives of people who had already gone, and lives of those not even born. It was no longer a mosaic that was in front of us but something else. Something that went much deeper.




Gale reached her hand forward and touched the edge of the mosaic. I followed where her fingers led, and found the artist’s white signature craved on top the many colors, an unreadable jumble of letters but still there none the less. As she ran her fingers over the inscription, again and again like a blind person reading braille, I realized where exactly we were going. This mosaic was just a part of it. I had known where we were meant to go all along.


We sat outside the cemetery looking at the broken buildings across the street. After finding and picking some flowers we had left them at the dead artist’s grave, and then left the cemetery. Gale had insisted on sitting on the curb for a while, caught up in the silence. I was the one who finally stood up. I slowly turned and laid my hand out in front of her, urging her to take it. She glanced up at me, that was the first time I noticed that the cuts and bruises on her face were almost gone, and her eyes seemed a little less black. She smiled then she took my hand and I pulled her up to stand next to me. We began walking down the empty street, for it was my turn to pick our next destination.