walking

You have a walking doppelganger, a swagger jacker, someone who, from afar, in the wrong light, lumbers along just right to be mistaken for you. I've wanted it to be you, wanted to shout across campus and watch the mile wide spread across your face, teeth somehow animated in full-disclosure.   It's never you, though--at least not yet. But when I see that saunter, my heart splinters, half for the you and half for the un-you in my midst. 

Walking is perspective. How shadows and shapes make themselves into what they really are and aren't. They're not you--the shadows that stop and start. 

I can stop and start, every step a deliberate choice. I can turn the corner and go inside the corner store, the one I've always wondered about, or I can breathe and listen to my mind give and take, stopping at the really old tombstones to remember people I've never met, or I can watch family dinner from outside, light pouring over the snow from the front window, forks in a constant rotation.  

Spaghetti takes a kind of slow I never see when I'm moving certain and frantic now is not the right place.