SOLVITUR AMBULANDO in the sky with crows
The day she turns 50, at precisely noon, despite an unseasonably harsh downpour, she begins to walk. After 49 years and 11 months of equivocation, on the momentously mundane occasion of her birthday, she realizes she needs to definitively decide: To live? Or to die? She will walk until she discovers a preponderance of reasons.
She spends the night before her birthday packing, and the morning of her birthday unpacking. The shockingly few things she needs fit into her regular backpack.
She counts the first 1,000 steps. She is her own pedometer, but only for that half mile. She is not away from the familiar yet, but she begins to see as a stranger.
This is the world. What is in it? She will stay in it or leave. What will become of it if she isn’t in it? What will happen or not happen if she stays? Is she a character in the world’s story, or is the world a story she makes up as she goes along?
REASON TO LIVE: Story. What happens next, knowing about it.
By the time it gets dark on her birthday, she finds new ways to walk without changing anything about the way she walks.
In a past quest for death or freedom, she sat on a cushion not looking at other people sitting on cushions, silent and motionless while trying to ignore the howling pain of her joints, while trying to let thoughts pass through her like neutrinos, grappling with knowledge—she sucked at it—while hating herself for hating herself for sucking at it. Breathing. Angry, not angry. She lied about it, silently, until she failed at lying too, then she changed her mind. Death would have to find her instead.
REASON TO LIVE: If the Dalai Lama can do it in exile…
Death watches her as the sky cycles through its palette of golds and peaches, purples and blues. Watched, she sees that hours and hours and hours of walking and nothing but walking have reduced her to nothing but walking. Thought is slippery. No friction, no lies. She doesn’t think about walking. She doesn’t think about not thinking about walking, nor anything else but walking. She walks.
But eventually comes and she is hungry—a surprise. Over the years, she has learned to know it is time to eat when she gets a headache and her hands shake.
REASON TO DIE: Have to eat every day. Have to shit every day.
But she walks a 4-lane street with streetlights now. Big suburban houses turn their backs to her. Cars pass every 5 minutes. No food offers itself to her with eager urgency. She continues to walk, her shaky fingers wrapped around her backpack straps.
She carries a rectangle of plastic in her left rear pocket. It is a magic key to open every portal, but here are no portals. No bus stops. No intersections. Nobody else is walking. Nobody slows down even to shout insults at her. She might be invisible. She might already be dead. She might be a ghost haunting a highway.
REASON TO DIE: Being lost at night, if you are.
Of course she is not dead. Of course after infinite time and steps and fear and dark and being cold and sweating and swearing and crying and deciding to die and then live and then die and first yielding to craven cowardice and then wallowing in the pride of the valorous virtuous traveler and then losing hope that she is strong enough to live or to die: here is the fast food for her.
She pays for the fast food with her magic key and eats it slowly, savoring every greasy oversalted morsel.
Then she desires to slide down in her molded plastic booth chair and let it mold her ass and her shoulder and her head and feet. She wishes to fall asleep right here. But if she does this, some shy and ambitious 19-year-old assistant manager will have to ask her to leave and so she gets up and she walks out.
The sky looks like black velvet somebody sprayed bleach on. The parking lot pavement is the color of midnight, for the same reason the ocean is blue sometimes.
REASON TO LIVE: Colors, even in the dark.
She has plastics and fleeces and rolled corduroys. On a patch of tired, used grass behind the fast food she lays them out. She situates herself away from security lights. The 19-year-old assistant manager might spot her bundled carcass, but will choose not to. Probably. After study, this is her analysis of sleeping somewhere unknown, based on no experience.
She falls asleep because she is tired. Sometime in the night, the 19-year-old assistant manager decides not to molest her. She lucks out.
REASON TO DIE: Sun rises. It is relentless.
REASON TO LIVE: Sun rises. It is reliable.
Crows wake her before sunrise does. She is the topic of crow conversations all around her. When she opens her eyes, one crow is very close. Her crow.
She knows this crow. She knows it by the way it parks directly in front of her, the way it halts its march to a delicious roadkill breakfast. She is being inspected by this crow that she recognizes from her dreams. She can tell it is her dream crow by how it looks at her. A chill disturbs her neck.
This is the crow that knows everything about her. It knows every bad thing she has done, all the good things she has not done. It knows the lovers she turned away from without saying why. This crow knows how many days and nights she has wasted in ludicrous pursuit of stillness.
This crow is her glossy black signpost, saying “This way, motherfucker.” This crow knows the answer to her quest. It won’t tell her. She has to find it herself. This crow laughs and calls her quixotic, its copper eye sparkling with malice.
She gets up. She has a lot more walking to do. She will see this crow again, awake and asleep.
REASON TO LIVE: You can’t know the reason to die (yet).
Lydia Swartz is an artistically omnivorous flaneur and story succubus. As a little girl, she went downtown with her mother. There were so many people to look at, each one sloshing with untold stories. That’s how it happened. (The crows came later.)
.
–Art by Menerva Tau
jordan Sneakers | Buy Yeezy Slides ‘Core’ – Kanye West x Adidas — Ietp