Eventually it was night and I walked and I ended up in a pub, and the room, I realized, was crowded with people who all seemed to know and love each other and they also knew that they didn’t know or love me and probably never would. I looked at my feet and noticed how the months-long heat of moving had melted the soles down, and I knew that the disrepair of my shoes gave something away about me — but I was always doing this, wearing shoes until they had been burned down to barely anything and I remembered that day at my mother’s house years ago when she had tried to get me to take an old pair of Ruby’s sneakers, a pair of light blue ones that she didn’t think Ruby had ever worn—They’re still in the box—and I hadn’t understood then that all she was offering me was a pair of shoes because my shoes were barely the approximation of shoes, just these worn-out, five-year-old Sambas that I’d kept not throwing out though they clearly needed to be thrown out — but that afternoon I’d said, No, no thanks, I’m okay, because I wasn’t okay about borrowing shoes I could never return to Ruby and I couldn’t put my feet where her feet should be and also I was nauseous over the fact that I had even been given that option, of putting my feet where the feet of my mother’s dead daughter should be, because I knew that I was her other dead daughter, just not her favorite dead daughter—They’ll just go to waste, she said, and How does your husband let you leave the house like that? What other option do you have? — but I took the other option (You have two options, he had said, two options) and the option I took was living with what I had, which, sure, wasn’t an indication that I could take care of myself, and these heavily damaged and barely useful shoes made it clear that I needed help, that my feet were in need, that I needed a better shoe option, that I needed a better option, that I needed to get it together, to get a life together, to get myself together, to get myself. I hadn’t gotten myself in a while and I maybe wasn’t going to get myself, it seemed, because my self had been, somehow, ungotten or forgotten or not getting it, whatever it was, or is, or had been, or would be that I didn’t get.
As I sat at the bar and I began to have the feeling I was a tin of dog food errantly placed on the exotic-fruit aisle with the tinned lychees and pineapple tidbits and I also knew that I was not a tin of dog food because a tin of dog food would have the luxury to simply be its dense and nothing self, and a tin of dog food wouldn’t push and wish against its tinned-ness, wouldn’t need to get anything.
Two women came up and put a plastic crown on the head of an oval-faced man standing near me at the bar. It was his birthday, it seemed, because the little crown had Happy Birthday written in purple cursive on it and even though every person who could read the crown was probably not the one having the birthday, something was still understood. What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem and I shifted slightly down the bar, toward a wall, to make room for all the people who cared that the oval-headed man had been born, then sitting at the bar seemed like a sad, pathetic place to sit. I couldn’t remember why coming to a bar was the choice that I had made, a clearly foolish, desperate, sad-looking choice, and I accidentally made eye contact with a man hunched over his arms on the other end of the bar and his eyes said something to me, asked me something people are always silently asking in these kinds of places and I wanted to scream at him, Don’t bother, but I just tilted my head to the wall and mouthed those words to myself, hoping he’d somehow get the signal.
27
Cars went, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood a considerable distance from the highway, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard last night, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone to remember us and come back and take us home, and I noticed the elaborate story I’d made for this little plant and wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been and I stood, again, alone, listening to the ocean falling over itself, hitting rocks, and I thought about going to the beach to have an idealistic moment with the ocean, but all the romance of travel had shriveled and now the ocean wasn’t such a thing to me; I was just trying to get somewhere, and later some bloke dropped me off in a little town, by a park that was in a neighborhood where people who don’t go to parks live, a neighborhood where people who do go to parks wouldn’t want to go. There was a monument by the entrance with some benches surrounding it. After a while two people walked up and sat on the ledge of the monument. They were dressed in identical outfits — school uniforms — white polo shirts and navy pants. They began kissing. One person was a boy with shaggy blond hair and the other was a girl with short black hair. They kissed rhythmically, their mouths the only point of contact, and I ignored them, or not quite ignored them but started reading a book, and while I looked at the book I started thinking of when I wore school uniforms and went with my boyfriend to a park to kiss in the spot where we thought no one would notice, except for that one woman who noticed that one time as she was passing in her hot-pink jogging outfit, the woman who said, Ah, young love!, in a tone that was not entirely unkind, and I thought it wasn’t kind to make us conscious of our youth and our then-uncomplicated love. I stared at my book, moving my eyes across the letters and thinking of that woman, of Ah, young love! and of her hot-pink jogging suit and of the wet smirk on that boyfriend’s face as she speed-walked away. The two uniformed people were still kissing, diligently nodding their faces together at a steady tempo.