COOL GUY

And what would happen if you didn't stop, if you kept going, if you continued walking past the young woman you saw in the street, with her curly hair and her resolved face, the young woman you passed at the corner going in the opposite direction, but who somehow, when you reached the next corner and looked back, was standing in front of her apartment building in the middle of the block, looking in the same direction as you, back toward the north from which you had both come, as though there were some sort of tumult, some loud occurrence that made you both turn your heads and look back, when in fact there is nothing at all but more barrenness and more emptiness? What would happen if you didn't stop, if this stop were in fact part of your progression, a necessary step in your travel southwards, southwards and eastwards but mostly southwards, past the park and the depot and the bike store and along that long street leading to the suburbs and the plains beyond? What would happen if you took your green coat and just kept walking?