It was an ambiguously sunny day, a day only Oregon could call sunny. The clouds didn't hang so low, and every so often the sun came out halfway. I walked through Normandale Park, across the freeway, down Glisan, south on 39th through Laurelhurst, taking pictures until my camera ran out of batteries.

I sat and read the paper between two people practicing for their Russian class, and a seemingly comatose homeless-looking man, staring wide-eyed into his coffee. It makes me antsy to stay indoors when I might be missing the sun, so I left again.

I started walking north, through Sunnyside Park, across Belmont and Stark, back through Laurelhurst Park, then on those strange streets where you never know what direction you're going. The houses were too perfect and the streets too quiet, though. I veered west, emerging on 33rd and Sandy. It would be super easy to take a bus home from here, I thought. I pretended to wait for the bus for a moment but I didn't want to stop walking.

I was itching with strange dissatisfaction. I wanted to be somewhere high up, somewhere with a view of the west hills. To be on top of the world. Somewhere windy. But I wanted to be around lots of people and traffic, I didn't want it to be quiet. I got to Broadway, which almost fit. The distant hills were blue against the sky. I walked west, farther and farther from home. The wind was right, twisting my hair around, and even though my feet and legs burned, and I passed several places where I could have rested or taken a bus home, I didn't stop.

The weirdest thing was that I had no desire to write. I wasn't even writing in my head. I didn't care that my camera was dead, I didn't want to eat or call anyone or do anything at all, I just wanted to keep walking, forever.

It reminded me of this essay I read in Tricycle: "To attribute meaning to an event or to a lifetime of events is an expression of dissatisfaction with things as they are. If I wash dishes as a practice in Zen mindfulness, I indulge my resistance to simply washing them in order to get them clean. I want the washing to be something more than it is, and so I give it spiritual significance. I want my life to have meaning, so I complain if what I do and what I am appears meaningless. Well, our lives are meaningless if we take meaning for a coherent narrative plot of some sort. When we strain to make our lives otherwise, we're merely telling ourselves a story."

When I read that I gasped in recognition. While I don't usually do things specifically for reasons other than their face value, I'm definitely guilty of attributing meaning to everything; this page is proof of that.

"A story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough." [Beckett]

But while I was walking, devoid of even the running narrative I usually keep up in my head, feeling the wind wash my soul clean, I thought of that article, and knew that now, for once, there was no story.

I stayed out long after the last light had faded from the sky, not wanting to miss a second of daylight. My hair became its own consciousness and my eyes went wide and wild. I bought another cup of coffee, and the barista handed it to me saying, "Thank you, you're beautiful." I was so lost in the sky that I almost didn't hear him, then murmured "Thanks" before I slipped back outside.

I'll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again.