Local time: Sunday, September 20, 2026, 9:39 am CST
Starting point: 1900 Barker (cafe), located: 816 Massachusetts
Song playing upon entry: “Waterfall,” by the Stone Roses
Local weather: 71 degrees, winds headed south, 8 mph, very light rain, speckles and spits really.
Emotional weather: fresh on the other side of a scorched-earth and heart-blistering week.
Witnessed one of the greatest magic tricks of the decade: my quick replacement in the wake of a nine year relationship. I’m not exactly sure how long it took him to move on, but within a month or two of me leaving he was with someone else.
As the clouds of this system moved, heavy and cool, I began to think about time.
The edge of what was once a wedding anniversary. The Sunday before the Fall Equinox, the imperceptible build up to a fall from light. Alongside the tilt of the earth’s axis I set out to build a new tradition.
Enter an experimental, an emotional geography.
Enter a woman, heartbreak reinvigorated, walking what could be perceived from up above as a sort of sigil over the city in which she grew up in.
New tradition, starting this year: to walk my city in a bound set of directions. This year: all left turns. Forming the shape of a square or rectangle. A four-sided shape, strong and sable-colored.
My constitution is like that of a colt. I jumped out of the womb wobbly-legged but ready for speed. For most of my life I have walked alongside lumbering moose and tortoises and my movements make them suspicious and angry.
But today I have to walk like them. Slowly, methodically. I bring my phone for photographs. I carry a notebook and pen to jot down what I see and remember.
No perfume graces my neck. No scent at all. I’ve got to investigate clean: what does it all smell like without my vanillas and Palo Santos?
From the cafe I take a left on 8th St. Direction: west.
There once was two men, both named Tom King.
One Tom was the head chef at a local, upscale restaurant. His voice was authoritative, a maxed-out boom. He walked around with a storm cloud face, perpetual furrowed brow. He was a mentor to my boyfriend at the time, an acerbic and short sous chef.
The other Tom was homeless. A former junkie. I have known and befriended many homeless men in my lifetime, beginning in childhood. Tom seemed punk. Tom seemed to have lived rough. He had a face from Detroit.
For most of the time I knew Tom he was homeless, but for a short while he lived above what was once the Round Corner Drug Store, now the Basil Leaf Cafe.
I walk west past the city pool, past the spot where I accidentally hit a kid with my handlebars as I rode my bike on the sidewalk. I remember her dad yelling at me with righteous indignation: “it’s a sidewalk, not a side bike!” I bristle at the thought that I could be so careless.
The city’s original residential grid section opens ahead. Old West Lawrence. Broad-shouldered porches settled like the immense tongues of mansions. Old money. I don’t have many memories here, this isn’t my side of the tracks.
I start to look down instead of up and out. I walk over our city’s characteristic “Lawrence Kansas” bricks.
I turn left on Ohio Street – the northern edge of campus. It’s a Sunday but five men are bent over the sidewalk, setting a new brick path to replace the upturned and gnarled one that has been disrupted over the years by tectonic root shifts and exorcisms.
Another block, I look up and see a set of stairs leading up to a grassy knoll where the sous chef and I once smoked a spliff. This was his hidden smoke spot as a student. I recall how it felt to be let in on a secret.
Direction: south.
The student “ghetto”: overturned red cups, emptied kegs. Trash. Hormones still lilt on the breeze like a noxious gas.
It smells of ozone with a flat pan of petrichor.
I’m climbing hilled terrain thinking they’re wrong that Kansas is flat.
Up ahead there’s a car blocking the curb cut. An old man idles perpendicular in a long white car and we make eye contact knowingly, telepathically: what a jackass.
10:11 am: I keep walking south and reroute, taking a left on 14th versus 15th. I use my bathroom and change out of my pants. The humidity is drinkable and everything clings to me.
I take a brief right onto Massachusetts street: my junior high, built as a monument to WWI soldiers. So easy to
remember
I remember
sitting out our school’s Fun Run. Even then I didn’t like to run. I liked to read. My English teacher, who had recently praised me in class for my writing, runs past me on that hallucinatory hot day and hisses down at me as I lounge in the itchy blue grass, I’m so disappointed in you.
I remember
my first boyfriend. An angry Scorpio who already had a “past” in junior high. A skateboarder, death-metal-guitar player. Notes passed in class. Hands held. Mystery. A thousand depths found in our kisses. Years later, I broke up with him in a high school parking lot. I had to leave, there was no way to make it work.
Turning left on 15th, Direction: east. Turning left on New York St, direction: north.
15th & New York: Charles, Khabira, Jessie and Lily’s house. Living rooms full of them, Khabira’s loom. The family records, CDs, tapes. Photos of the normally beatific Charles laughing. Then Keven, then Jeff Buckley.
Their home was safe. Their wide porch held us as we powered through freshly washed colanders of blueberries. Many wasted afternoons with the nieces and nephews over.
I remember walking around this block, young and yearning. I entered then into the premature belief that something was missing. Things were wrong-shaped I thought. This song, its chorus became a rhythm with time. I’m singing it now, again, step-step.
New York street heading north. It’s so quiet. Only birds. Another breeze. I remember being brokenhearted about the world I had to leave behind – then and now. Nothing would ever feel like that again, I thought.
I look down, a different brick pattern. They usually flow in expected order. A few remapped in a tilted square. Looking closely I see a cluster of gold bolts in the cracks.
Sidewalks disappear, reappear. Uneven. Grassy, weedy, leaf-full and crunchy now. The seasons are changing, earth says.
I am in walking meditation. I am reminded of how to position myself in this weather. I am open, I am listening. I am looking. I walk through portal after portal: some are physical, touchable, some are spinning like a loose, sparking wagon wheel of memory. It comes and goes in an inky darkness. It is an all-around unreliable thing.
I am walking towards the beginning, the end. I walk through a tunnel of green, latticed branches and the smell of mint. On the other side a tree asks me to stop and read her.
I am reminded of my place in time; someday I’ll disappear. I am reminded of my place in another’s heart; I’m already gone. Both days are not of my choosing.
I take my final left on 8th. Returning. I see a drag queen, exquisite makeup, her driver’s side door open, her body leaned in, her body leaned out as she carefully places a blond, curly wig atop her head.
I decide the sigil is complete; it’s time to go home now.
