a walking entrance

- I like walking; I walk a lot daily, sometimes with no purpose or direction. Sometimes I even take longer paths to my destinations or just cover improvised circuits for no reason at all. I walk to places where other people would go by vehicle and my daily routine includes a great amount of walking.

- So you walk? Big fucking deal…

-I would say it’s a liberating deal, fulfilling an instinct remnant of our nomad past. To walk is to know your surroundings and to be prepared for them; there is no better way to dive into the realities of life than to take a walk.

-Is that so? Then take one and leave me alone, can’t you see I’m busy?

-I was like you once you know? The center of my life was my computer and I spent all day in front of it wandering the internet in search for realities better than mine.

-So we are judging one another now, aren’t we? Well, I would say there is plenty of material to judge a person like you, but why on earth would I spend energy on something as senseless as even caring about you?

-Yesterday, the most interesting and exciting thing happened to me in one of my walks.

- (rolling my eyes with annoyance, “some people… huh”)

- I was coming home from downtown when I decided to sit in a benched alley behind a mall and read for a while. I was actually making time; I did not want to go home, now that I think about it, of late I never want to be home, so I sat in one of the benches and began to read. For about five minutes I was oblivious to the world around me, just reading peacefully. But then, for whatever reason, I looked up. The most gorgeous young girl was sitting across from me, a slender blond beauty of blond hair and fair skin.

-You sound like a fucking bard, so the girl was hot, don’t speak as if you came from the fifteenth century.

- I never heard her when she came and sat, she was just sitting there when I looked up. I took a good look at her; the wind was blowing through the alley, making her long hair…

-Oh please, you are very corny, and it sickens me.

- I kept looking at her, but when she looked up at me, I instinctively looked down.

- Of course you did.

- I continued reading, I thought for sure that she must have been waiting for someone, but more than two hours passed and no one came. She kept looking at me from time to time, but I just pretended to be reading when she looked at me.

- Are you fucking kidding me? You sat there for two hours, in front of her and did nothing, if he was annoying me before, now he is just making me angry. What good can you get out of being a freaking poet, speaking of gorgeous little ladies with fair skin and blond hair blowing in the wind if you don’t have the balls to talk to them?

- I wanted to, I really did! I just did not know how.

- I am not surprised that you were afraid, but there was no reason to be, if she rejected you, you could have washed the humiliation away in one of those long walks of yours, but you stayed in your ass for two hours and did nothing until she left, probably annoyed and disappointed.

- Do you really think she was expecting something from me?

- How the fuck should I know? But well, hehe, you never will either so what’s the point of sweating over it.

- The worst thing about it is that at the end I got the most brilliant idea, I had several books in my bag, one of them was very cheap and I did not care much for it. So I took a pen out, wrote a note, placed it inside that book and placed the book by my side, then I continued reading the other. My plan was to leave the book behind, but make sure she saw that I did. If she took the book to give it to me she would see the note, with an invitation for coffee today.

- Ha! Well, I don’t know what to think of that, at least is better than doing nothing.

-The problem is that she left abruptly just after I finished writing the note.

- Of course she did and then, naturally, you took a walk, a long walk, because that was all that was left for you to do after your complete and utter waste of a perfect opportunity to talk to a chick.

- Yes.

The sun sets behind the volcanoes, Popocatépetl (left) and Iztaccíhuatl, a daily view a few blocks from my current house. December 24, 2012.