Concrete kept her company on her journey amid the monoliths of brick and glass that held captive the uncertain things that were like her but not at all like her. How could they be, these things that made her mind dart behind her eyes and hide until the world around her grew chill or sober? The streets were her sole ally held beneath her feet that were always as she left them and never did they find in her an error. They were ‘A Certain Thing’, a title bestowed upon two things in her life and of the pair they had the whole of her.

If only she could always feel alone out there but the sensation of eyes came again and drove her inside. Up steps she went in retreat from the sidewalk to the dimmer side of a dull brown door. Behind a hall somewhere rested or, maybe, not yet rested an owner of a cat and the cat or was the cat owned at all? It was an Uncertain Thing and it gnawed at pieces of her but never her. Stairs were next, though maybe in their brief use they became steps. More halls were ahead with more behind them but she could not spare another thought for another unknown thing.

It was her home or was it her room? The lock accepted her key but how could the room that may be her home accept her? Papers held reports of things that changed each day except for their reports which never changed and so they felt false and dead to her. They lay on the floor and on couches and tables under the skins of fruits that belong and once belonged to living things. Now they that are the skins rested and became less. The reports beneath them bled as the events they described must be living and bleeding.

Her memories belonged outside of her in rooms of brick and mortar but they remained where she put them under her skin to live, to bleed, and to wither. They were excised with sharp instruments so they could be studied and dissected on paper as thoughts mounted on declarations of events that may have happened but they never happened to her.

They died on the paper every time.

She snatched a coffee filter to reuse from beneath a blanket beside where the television was tolerated for a while and rubbed it against a page of words. Her hope was that it could give life to them so they could be as her memories were underneath. It became a sound.

It was a new sound without direction. It was a voice without words but full of intense feeling. Then it subsided. The anticipation was always the worst part. The sensation of eyes came again to remind her it was not safe to stay.

Out she went again to attack the streets with her movements. “Stay!” she demanded of the concrete below. It followed her commands and she was once more assured that they would listen. She marched with the purpose of approaching the point ahead that vanished in the distance. Whether it could be reached was uncertain and not her concern.