To continue undeterred
What had occupied him was the notion of starting over, and standing here now he considers three things carefully.
The loose straw in the corner is curious. Glancing over it, he finds he can trick his mind into seeing faces among the shadows. He isn’t sure whether the former owner—owners?—had left it all here on the ground out of some intention of the transaction or if it was just an assumption of setting, like a light fixture, a shower curtain. Nor, for that matter, did he know what straw—hay?—was even used for in the first place. Are animals involved? Who was it that he had argued with decades ago about the decision to adopt a dog. Odd that so many arguments, so many struggles, concern the self-made illusion of a delayed reality that never quite arrives: the shift from working more often to less, the looming question of relocation. Movement from somewhere bustling to somewhere more quiet, was the common talking point between them. Packed into identical apartments a bus ride away, monuments to minimalism, or else plucked down the freeway past toll booths between stretches of bumper-to-bumper, because We Could Have a Yard. Not unlike strands of straw bound into bales, the two of them, back then. Everyone, for that matter. Were there bales resting along the walls here, before, and was there a third meaning for the word ‘bale’? His own life trajectory seems like a line leading him to this late afternoon of déjà vu. In fact, it had been a collision between two illusions, actually, like the intersection of two winding streets that met once, but too early on to ever lead to the same far-off place reliably. There is only a single toll booth in the sixty mile northwest-southeast stretch between his skyscraper and his straw. He calculates how many rolls of quarters he should ask for at the bank each month, average number of trips times fourteen times two—there and back—with forty quarters per roll so perhaps three rolls to be safe. A future problem, imagined and solved. When You Say ‘Make a Mental Note’: That Bugs Me. The strewn straw, like the dead prairie grass outside, was a version of carelessness so novel to him that he remains frozen, comparing the scene to yellowed ethernet cables abandoned on the floor of his office after the harsh walls of the server room had been otherwise stripped ahead of renovations. He kicks his heel uncertainly at the dust of the structure. How could he have known his own direction, that the destination he defended would not persist, that she might have been standing right here. Their intersection had occurred too early. The idea is to take as few trips back as possible but best to ask for three rolls of quarters just to be safe. So that he can continue undeterred.