“Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton. / Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.” — Gabrielle Calvocoressi

I remember little of my childhood — in fact, my memory is mostly fog before early high school, obscuring the faces of past classmates and relatives in China and people who used to be very important to me. But I think my mind holds most tightly onto the times I traversed a place, entirely carefree: tumbling across the elementary school field with grass-stained jeans and muddy hands; racing my family friend through downtown Julian; walking the Xiamen pedestrian path, my uncle carrying a handful of roasted peanuts in his pocket for us to share. 

C hates the way the city juts into the lagoon and we only see one egret today. O and I sketch plants, look out at the water, sunset-flecked with orange and red. S, J and I find clay in the canyon and, at the top of “hell hill,” watch the suburbs sprawl across the chaparral. S practically recites a video essay about Alcibiades and J and I talk about modern dating expectations and with A, I am quiet. I hold hands and skip with O and C and R. M likes to dilly dally but I jog to keep up with D. K gets tired walking up hills. We have some minutes for lunch so in Philly, K is routing to sandwiches on the GPS. We spin in circles as the arrow on screen flips back and forth until L points across the street, and we realize we are already there.

“I walk among them but none of them are noticing.” — Sylvia Plath

Sometimes I like to float through these places like a specter. I like to let the sounds and colors phase through my body. In daily interactions, I am hyperaware of how I — often unsuccessfully — alter my behavior to come off a certain way to various collectives or individuals. However, when this grows tiring, especially in large groups, I grow silent. I am content with the act of observing, a fly on the wall to what is happening. 

In any case, we change our behavior when observed, according to the Hawthorne effect, which draws a satisfying parallel with the quantum observer effect. Depending on the observer, the observed and the relationship between them, we may be influenced more or less by another’s gaze. For what, to me, seems like an extremely sparse group of people, no gaze influences their behavior. In line with the gaze’s pressure is the persistent need for validation: to have a reason behind each action we take. Some argue that this is necessary for society to function, but it is hindering in extremity. Since we walk as a means of transportation, to walk without a destination or time to spare feels like a rebellion. Whether or not it exists, I feel closest to free will. 

“Look, and look again. / This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.” — Mary Oliver

In “When You Reach Me” by Rebecca Stead, Miranda Sinclair’s mom says that we walk through the world with a veil in front of our faces and the world is “kind of blurry, and we like it that way.” But sometimes, the corner of that veil lifts and we “see the world as it really is” for just a little bit, “all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to.” My mom’s veil lifted when I sat down halfway through our nighttime walk. She let me lay in her lap on the cold sidewalk and point out constellations without once asking if I had unfinished work. Stead writes that when we learn to lift the veil ourselves, we no longer depend on the wind. 

“There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” — T.S. Eliot

In middle-of-nowhere, Georgia, we try to get to the Korean BBQ store. It is our third time taking the few-blocks walk. G and I stop to buy felted chickens from a mother and daughter at the craft market and after a while, everyone goes on. “They’re leaving,” I say, maybe a little agitated, but G doesn’t appear to care. We take our time paying and talk to the pair about their business and we eventually still make it to lunch. 

B and D and I are leaving the Iowa Prairie Lights Bookshop when they steer me towards the old man on the street corner with a wagon full of poetry. And he is saying something great as the lights of chain stores and restaurant fires flare in the night. He is showing us the book in his hand and coming off wrong sometimes but we are still listening. Mid-passage, our friend who grew up with an unsafe downtown thinks we are in trouble, makes some excuse and pulls us away.

In the San Diego airport rush, I drop my phone and a stranger picks it up. We have the same flight, but I live where she is leaving and she lives where I am going. As we speed walk to the terminal, unecessary since our flight boards in forty minutes, I ask her about places I might stop by while I am there. She and her husband watch my luggage as I go to the bathroom, even though later I find out that one should never watch a stranger’s luggage at the airport.

Before Admit Weekend opening ceremony, I want to see the campus art museum. Pulling away from the already-growing queue, a security personnel — who’s been pointing in one direction and repeating “ceremony that way” for a long time — stops me, annoyed, to say that the “opening ceremony is right there, that way.” I tell him I want to see the arts center and he becomes a man revived. “That’s the best place on campus,” he says. I ask him if I should join the line instead and he waves me off, spouting directions that I forget immediately. He re-iterates, simplifying: “you’ll see a big ‘YO’ on the sidewalk, it’s literally saying ‘yo!’,” or something like that. “You can’t miss it.” 

Maybe I would sell my soul for a drink on any day. During free drink night at a student-run cafe I walk slowly as the line crawls, pausing to doodle on the community board, and one of the baristas manning the cash register mistakes me for someone she’s met before. I understand why the line has been moving so slowly when we ease into conversation. By the end I find myself promising her I will commit to this school and work at the cafe in the fall, which she jokes is in return for a strawberry matcha.

Street interviewing with Z at Balboa Park, we approach residents with “we’re student reporters” and I remember how much I love this label. With it, I approach strangers with places to be and they propose “let’s walk and talk.” I ask if I can record, fumbling with my phone and they are okay with my inelegance, probably since “student” precedes reporter. As we get past logistics, the “yeahs” turn into “great questions” and they let spill the wisest, most genuine perspectives I never heard before while half out of breath.