You are a miracle of avoidance. So you walk. Walk until your hip flexors are leather straps pulling your abdomen taut toward your legs. Your head floats aloft, aware of little but the BQE ocean beneath the Promenade. 

It’s less like exercise than it means to be, this walk. Wind and sun carry you along. Dog walkers, roller bladers, thousand-dollar strollers, kids fiddling with a drone that dips toward the highway below. Something hangs in the balance.

So much easier to move the body than the will. You figure you willed the body out here, but perhaps the mind is not so moveable. How can that be? The body with its vessels, organs, systems, the skeleton’s shapes. Complex machinery, as Mr. Lute, your high school anatomy teacher, would say.   

The mind, rather, hides from you. That whisper of self you carry inside the skull, electric emanation from gray matter. You find yourself observing its movements like a herd of deer, hopeless to corral. 

Even as you write this, the deer dart off to the side, seize along a broad hill in the sun as the wind moves the grass opposite their hooves. The mind prefers this wildness.

Years ago, you learned you cannot train deer. Chain them, cage them, and behold a collection of ghost-waifs. Not beasts of burden or pets, but pale trophies of a strange woodland empire. One by one, you set (most of) them free. 

They trot away from the page, notice it again, type a sentence, move away. You clasp the metaphor. Ears prick, black marble eyes ogle at the page, which is a mirror. Deer may not have a self, but you do. 

Somewhere in all this fear, there is a story. You can’t approach the herd with your body, study it with sense. Your spirit must dilute and reconvene, learn to trust the language again, as it must every day. Deer do not love, but this herd loves words. The muscles on their backs ripple, and their necks lengthen. Rhyme, even a cheap one, summons keener attention. 

They startle, shoot through the forest, fear agile as ever. You breathe in, read the inscription on the mirror, and breathe out.