The hallway was a sea of papers thrown every which way as a final act of celebration, defiance, or peer pressure. He reached down and picked up one of the stray papers on the floor. It was crumpled and had two shoe prints on it, one nearly smack in the middle and one leading off its right hand corner. It was comical, really – this annual act of chaos, for what was school if not ordered and organized?

He thought back through the years. He recalled the early years of preschool and kindergarten where he made friends, said goodbye for the day with high fives, and happily absorbed first things like making paper costumes for holidays and counting to one hundred. Memories of home school years with his sisters were a collage of songs about fractions, and reading assignments in the tree house, and timed tests, and the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog typing lessons. He thought of the Middle School years when all around him tried to fit in while feeling out-of-place. And here he was – in the High School hallway he’d walked through countless times. He looked around. The halls were quiet now. Everyone had rushed outside to linger over last goodbyes for the year and then jump into summer with both feet.

What was it really, this routine of sitting and listening and reading and writing and studying and testing? What was the working out problems on a sheet of paper? What was the rehearsing of lines and notes? He stared off in the distance, turning it over in his mind. The future could hold more of the same if he chose, and he did. But not the same. Sitting in a class was a small part of learning. It provided building blocks. But how to use those blocks – that was the real assignment. And how to live his life – that was the true test.

He was on his own now. He would decide what to study just as he would decide what paths to take and which to leave untraveled. The shoe print smack in the middle of the paper? It wasn’t his. But the other one, the one beginning its own trail? A shadow of a smile crossed his face. If it wasn’t his now, it would be.

Photo: Joe Mabel [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

She shook the snow from her foot. Stepping into a rather large slush pile on the curb wasn’t a good omen for this meeting. Why was she even going? One, she didn’t even know the guy. Two, a random drawing at the local coffee shop probably wasn’t the best way to meet someone. Three, where was her best friend who had talked her into it in the first place? Half-way across the state by now, she guessed – making a trip home to surprise her family on Valentine’s Day. Who surprises her family on a day meant for love?! Well, okay. Maybe that wasn’t quite what she meant. But any sane person would know what she meant without her having to clearly articulate it.

She pulled the paper heart out of her coat pocket and squinted at the address. It was just the next block. When the barista had given them each a pink paper heart with their lattes and told them to write their name on it, it had seemed harmless. She had noticed he told his male customers to write their name and also the name of a local diner or restaurant, time, and date. Later, another barista had passed around a glass canister for each to drop in the pink paper. As they left, they were given a heart with a name, restaurant address, date, and time. Her friend’s poor guy would be stood up. If she was any kind of smart, hers would be, too. Still, underneath it all she believed everyone should agree with her assessment: Valentine’s is a day when corny is cool.

She stuffed the heart back into her coat pocket, pulled off a glove to run her fingers through her hair, and stole a glance at herself in the window of a shop she passed. One more building and she would be there. She stopped. What was she thinking? She would just go home. No harm, no foul. As she turned around, she bumped into a man. Mid-twenties, she guessed. Dark hair. Athletic build. Tennis shoes with a small rip on the right side.

An ‘excuse me, maybe you should look where you’re going’ nearly escaped her lips. It didn’t. He looked up from what he’d been reading. In his hand was a pink paper heart.

Valentine’s is a day when corny is cool.

Image: enwikipedia.org-heart.jpg

He unfolded the paper and reread it one last time.

You want to move on, I know. But in case somewhere down the road when your mind wanders to past things and you want to remember, I’m leaving the twig on the base of the statue in the park we used to call ours. I know how you loved it – that small, silly representation of first love I broke off from a fledgling tree during our first walk there. Remember how every walk after, we toasted the growing tree with that twig? You can have the symbol of its springtime buds and summer leaves and vivid autumn color and sparkling snow resting on its bare winter branches. You can have the path we traced so many times, the faint sound of timeless music playing at the band shell on the other side of the lake, and the pungent scent of lakeshore. You can have the sunsets so brilliant they make your heart ache.

I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll always hope for your happiness, for good things to come your way, for blessing to meet you on the sidewalk.

He refolded the note, stooped down and slid it under her apartment door. Turning, his form bathed in a sunset of deepest orange and red, he walked away.

Image: Acer_tataricum_twig-wikimedia-commons.jpg; pixabay-sunset-214576_640-CC0-Public-Domain.jpg

As the solid cement of the building resupplied my courage, he was suddenly in front of me, and the muted gray of dusk turned charcoal.

“Why do you chase me?” he asked.

“I . . . I . . . you . . .”

His intensity took my breath away. I wiped my clammy palms on my jeans. So what if he could hear my heart beat like the tell-tale heart? I was on the offense, not the defense, wasn’t I? I would not let him intimidate me. I WOULD NOT.

“What mindlessness draws people like you to chase me? You’re the same ones who would be most dismayed to catch up with me.”

I gulped and he was gone. The conversation that had taken less than a minute seemed as though it had lasted an eternity.

I ran back home, knowing he would be able to tell where I lived if he followed. At this point I didn’t care. I just wanted to be somewhere familiar, somewhere safe. I slammed the door behind me, locked the deadbolt with trembling hands, and watched as my dog took one whiff of me and hid under the couch.

Later, when my breathing had returned to normal and the sirens of the evening blended with street sounds of my city block, I sat with my cup of tea and thought about what he had said. Chasing him? Well, sure, but only because I wanted to prove I – what was it I had thought at the time? Trifled with? Yes, couldn’t be trifled with.

Maybe I did prove it. I’d caught up with him, after all. But to be perfectly honest, it didn’t feel like I’d proven anything. I turned to one of my favorite shows on the television, but the evening’s murder investigation started me thinking things that hadn’t before occurred to me. I switched it off. I grabbed a book I had been reading, and slammed it shut after a paragraph. I switched on the T.V. again and listened as a political ad droned on about someone who thought that I deserved to get what I wanted, not what I worked for. I thought for a minute about what I deserved and threw my shoe at the T.V. It went black.

I switched on a lamp. Who was he anyway, this immoveable, intense man who sent shivers straight to my gut; who I’d never seen before, but who seemed slightly familiar? Not familiar like an old acquaintance. Familiar, maybe like an old textbook. Like that.

No. Impossible.

What if it was him? Whether I was correct about his identity or not, there was one thing I did know. Loathe to admit it though I was, he was right. I had been chasing him without a thought of what that meant other than my immediate desire to prove something. I hadn’t thought of the peripheral, the fall out. And if he was who I now thought he might be, my mind had already revealed that I had been chasing him long before he confronted me on this golden day. When I inhaled the golden light of fall, I thought of tombs and pirates, not warmth and light. I really was playing that lottery that had flitted through my brain like a sudden breeze.

There are many things I chase in life, some more worthwhile than others. But on a golden afternoon that knocked the breath out of me with fright I wonder. Should Death really be one of them?

Photo: 800px-Light_In_The_Dark_2886931703-wikimedia-commons.jpg

I could just see the shadow slanting slightly like some willow bending toward the water. It turned toward me then, and I pulled back behind the corner of the building which I told myself hid me. What was I doing? The evening’s mystery had begun as an afternoon stroll through the park by my house. Isn’t that the way all trouble begins: Innocence pulled gradually by some subtle power until you’re standing behind a building a mile from where you should be, trying to breathe noiselessly though you’re sorrowfully certain your heartbeat can be heard a block away?

I had begun my walk to see the trees. They were golden this year. Maples splashed red here and there, but the air itself seemed mostly – well, like I said – golden. King Tut’s tomb. Pieces-of-eight. The lottery that changed things of value to a thin, printed paper of possibility. I digress, of course, to avoid the obvious.

You see, I was looking up as I walked, the better to take in the fire and shine of the season, when I bumped into something. At least that’s what I had immediately thought since it was immoveable, like a lamp-post. My abrupt stop and reverted sight line, however, showed me a person I would guess to be around 6 feet, 3 inches of mostly muscle knit together with intensity. He looked into my eyes for a split second while I stood fixed to the spot wondering how I would explain my disappearance to my dog who I had left at home as punishment for whining into the wee hours of the early morning. Then he was gone and I was shivering in the balmy air of the autumn afternoon.

I’m not being dramatic. He really was gone. I turned to look and there was nothing there. Any sane person would have cut her stroll short and gone home, but I told myself that I wasn’t going to allow anyone, even if they were a disappearing man, rob me of my afternoon stroll. So I kept walking until I got to the other end of the park. Then I thought what if I didn’t see him because he had hidden? That makes sense, right? Maybe I should go home like the sane person I wasn’t and lock my door. But then (I reasoned) if he was, in fact, following me, maybe I shouldn’t go straight home. Maybe I should take a divergent path to shake his trail. OR, and this is where the trouble really began, maybe I should try to find him, follow him, and prove to us both I wasn’t anyone to be trifled with.

At that point, I turned and started back the way I’d come, eyes darting behind every bush and tree. I kept walking beyond the park then because I thought I spotted him, and that’s when I noticed the golden light had turned to muted gray. Dark would follow in a matter of half an hour, fall being what it is, and I was a mile of crooked sidewalks from home.

to be continued . . .

Photo: Pinterest