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It was in that tiny city I pretended to live in that I discovered The Book of Disquiet. One evening while leaving my friend alone in her space, I go to the closest bookstore where I spend nearly every evening reading but never buying. It is a large bookstore and easy to sit in unnoticed. I have very little money and no intention of purchasing anything. But somehow I pull out The Book of Disquiet, and something about it is familiar to me, though I don’t know why. In my blindness, I wander to the register and purchase it, then make my way out of the store and onto a city bench in the dark.
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On that street where I lived in the Green Mountains, on the nights when I woke in the middle of that moonlit road, I would stand and look up at the sky. I couldn’t understand how I had done it, how I could have been so wrong. I thought I’d been diligent, clinging to the side of the street within the weeds. Instead, I had unconsciously led myself to wander down the middle.
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I live in a city now, a city with a grid system and four diagonal streets cutting through which everyone who lives here can name. It took a long time for me to learn this grid system. The friends I made when I moved here assured me that as long as I knew the grid I would never get lost. They said this to comfort me, knowing I’d moved here from the mountains. But I resisted this information; I resisted the grid. And I got plenty lost.
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