I walked around the world today.

I tramped through the hills outside a friend's ancient, embattled city. I wandered the rooms of the house my friend had built in the tiny German hamlet where he is the only young person. I discussed Portuguese authors in a Berlin cafe with a Spanish man en route to a co-op in Copenhagen. Under a burnished peach sky, I sat outside an alley brasserie in Spain, where once you and I, over tapas composed of strange sea creatures, had talked about freedom. I hiked in Oregonian forest with the friend who is too poor to visit me. I danced in LA, amidst my friends whose skin glow in besotted darkness. I birdwatched in Hawaii with the friend who had welcomed us into her old apartment in Brooklyn on a humid gray autumn afternoon. I swept a flooded house in Baja California, at the Pacific's sibilant edge.

When I had visited every place in the world that I had ever wanted to revisit, I stood outside the door of the flat in the cold gray city where we will settle, if only temporarily, if always temporarily.

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