I want to walk in a city whose streets are endless and meandering, a place where I don’t or need to know where I am going, or where the next street is, only that it connects to the next and the next. Walk along train tracks until we pass into the next city, the next town, where more streets await. Me and my streets. I will keep walking them, and watch them multiply. Watch them expand into territories yet uncharted, into large green fields where the sunset will dim the entire village, then into quiet towns where a street becomes a main road becomes an alleyway becomes a path becomes a street again. It is my next travel mission statement. To just walk. Walk walk walk. Make faces at stray animals. Eat whenever I feel like it. Sit down whenever I need to. Drink whatever I want. Sometimes I think getting drunk is a good thing. At least, then thinking is optional. Erase, rewind. Rewind, record, play.
Next. I want to sit in old trains and watch scenery pass. To not think about anything, not because I’m choosing to, but because the scenery is overwhelming, is magnificent and spectacular in every aspect, and the light from the sun hits the right angles all day, and the mountains we pass brood with an oh-so-attractive gloom, and the fields we speed past go on forever in our eyes, with the green spreading and spanning and enveloping everything else we try to see.
I need a simple word. One that would restart an ambition, a dream, a secret mission without its spies, and then one that would be recycled and regurgitated before ever being articulated, and then one that dies a little whenever thought about. A simple word that fits easily in those categories. With that in tow, we alight our perfect train and continue walking down into foreign streets with foreign people speaking in foreign languages, drinking foreign beverages, smoking foreign fags, worrying about foreign troubles, fighting with foreign nemeses (we would pause here for a bit, wondering if we should retreat), wearing foreign fashion, and dreaming foreign nightmares. With our word in tow, right where we need it, we brave foreign weather with our local bodies, see foreign flowers with our local eyes, and sing foreign songs with our local voices. This and other streets. We keep on walking them; they keep on multiplying, dividing themselves in branches, into tributaries, into split ends no one thought to repair. We keep our word handy, eager to spit it out but wary of our would-be short-lived vindication. What a tease. No.
