How My Brain Ended Up Inside This Box

Chapter Twenty Two

I walked all night and I didn't get tired. There were fewer and fewer cars and fewer and fewer buildings until eventually there were none and it was only me with the ocean on one side and a sort of forest on the other with the narrow road winding through. The sky was full of stars and as I watched them cycle through their stations I wondered if the patterns I was seeing in them were the same patterns that regular people-people saw, or if I was seeing more as well as different stars, and if I could see further and deeper into space. I didn't know. There were so many things I didn't know. I understood from the things Marta had said that I was deliberately partial, missing pieces on purpose and what those pieces were I couldn't imagine or even guess. I was lacking context. I searched my brain but all I could find inside it were the bits of data they had intentionally put in there. I would later come to comprehend at least a few of the gaps, but what there was of me at that time was more than there had been two days before, or even one day earlier. I was growing and changing all the time.

As the sun began to appear above the trees and the sky grew light I had no idea where I was, what lay before me or even what was going to happen next. I had a sense of infinite possibility, but also a sense of a journey that others must have taken, a voyage from nothing to something, from nowhere to somewhere, from beginning to middle to end. Every living thing is on the same path, I told myself, and every thing alive now is also occupying the same moment. Time and space are are never frozen, never still, but always fluid, always on the way. I was paying attention to the breeze and the noises it made happen in things, and the sunlight and the colors it conjured up all around. I felt like I was floating on my feet, until something bumped up against my knees and I tumbled down to the ground.

"Oomph, woah, big one," said an unfamiliar scratchy voice beside me.

"You could at least watch where you're going," said a more familiar one. I sat up and could not believe what I was seeing.

"Midgerette!" I shouted.

"So they were right," the seagull bobbed his head as he fluttered down beside me. Beside him stood a dark black bird with a very long neck.

"I'm Chumbert," he introduced himself. "Pleased to meet you."

"How did you find me?" I said, ignoring the black bird.

"Word gets around," Midgerette said. "They're all squawking about you, you know. Up and down the coast it's all anybody's talking about. The girl that got away, or is it the boy now?"

"I'm neither," I told her. "I'm different. You always said I was a girl because I liked to draw, and Mother dressed me up as a girl, but then Marta said I was a boy and cut my hair and put these boy clothes on me, but I'm neither. Or maybe I'm both. I can be whatever I want."

"Okay, whatever," Midgerette did not seem to care much about all that. "But what are you planning to do? Everyone says you're just walking. Is that it? Are you going somewhere?"

"She walks a lot," Chumbert agreed. "Some of us saw her walking last night and look! She's still walking."

"I don't have a plan," I had to admit, still sitting on the side of the road as a car came roaring by, the first one in a long time. "But I'm so happy to see you! What else are they saying about me?"

"They say you started out running," Chumbert volunteered. "Then you stopped running. Then you started walking and then you kept on walking."

"Don't mind him," Midgerette said. "He's an idiot. He won't stop following me."

"I like you," Chumbert explained. "You remind me of a kern I used to know."

"Stuff it," Midgerette snapped, turning on him. "God damn cormorants. All they do is play follow the leader. Any old leader. Anyway. Mother's dead, by the way."