So who was I kidding?

I mean, I wanted to start the journey right, so I hiked through the city on foot, bridge after bridge, walkway after walkway, until I finally came to the Ferry, where I was going to board a boat to the mainland. The cashbot went retinal to debit my account, but I had turned off my eye-disabled ir, uv, & credit-link. So the bot patiently asks for a credit number. (And by the way, thank God for robots. Can you imagine if services in this city were actually staffed by New Yorkers? It would be the bitchiest town on the planet.)

Anyway, she asks me for my credit number. I can't remember. And can't look it up either, because I carefully hadn't worn any computers.

So much for symbolism.

So I trudged back to my apartment. The tough, durable, real-leather-not-synthetic hiking boots I bought to go offline in because they seemed right (and looked good with my summer skirts) had rubbed a couple of real-not-artificial blisters into my feet. The resulting limp made me feel less like a woman of destiny and more like a hapless wuss.

But then, I told myself, wasn't that the whole point of going offline? Unmediated experience. Life worn in the body.

So I poured myself some tonic water and then I put some gin into it so it wouldn't be lonesome, and I looked at some pictures of me and Abuela, and I cried a little more. There were more messages screaming on my monitor. (Including from you all! My God! The sympathy notes! When I finally did read them I sat in front of the screen for hours with a stupid smile on my face, crying and sniveling. I was wearing this very chic puff-blouse with a lacy sleeve that I blame you for soiling, because I had to keep wiping my teary face and dribbling nose as I pored through one message after another, and another, and another.)

(Any volunteers to lend me a shirt?)

(Just kidding.)

(Mostly….)

*

But right then, I stoutly ignored all my messages. I taped some new skin to my blistered heels and wrote my credit number on a slip of paper and left the apartment, for real this time, determined to get on that ferry and never look back. At least not until I had . . . I don't know. Found peace. Grown a soul. Whatever.

Anyway, clump, clump, clump, down the stairs came Laia Salla. I was in a hurry to grow up into my sterner, quieter, more serious self, so I thought I'd better just hire a water-taxi to get me to the ferry terminal. There I bought a ticket to the mainland and a Hiker's Guide to the Appalachians. And a backpack. And some bottles of water. Also, some bass jerky and seaweed pemmican, and a bag of those little chocolate-covered pecans, in honor of Abuela, who used to pop them into me when I was little and chubby, just as if she was feeding a squirrel. Plus I was hungry from all that walking.

*

Two days later I was huddled miserably under a tree somewhere in western Pennsylvania in the pouring rain, soaked to the skin and coughing hard, cold and hungry and really really tired: and I had a searing revelation, which was that pain sucks, and you don't need to go looking for it.

Pain will come and find you when it wants you. In the meantime, the rest of my species-yeah, the humans, that's right-had spent the last thirty thousand years inventing agriculture and steam engines and microwaveable popping corn and painless dentistry, and it was pretty damn arrogant of me not to be properly grateful for it.

And then I realized that the earth is a beautiful living organism, a seamless integrated whole in which every species fills its anointed niche, and that my particular niche was somewhere in the SoHo - Meat Packing Distict - Little Brooklyn area, and I was compelled as a matter of natural law, if not sacred obligation, to fill that niche. And plus I was really hungry. And furthermore, while it's true I'm vain, I'm good-looking too; while it's true I gossip, my friends are the best things in my life. And I think we are all a mixture of virtues and vices, and while I was certainly cutting down on my opportunities for sin by sitting out here freezing my ass off, I was keeping myself from doing any good, too.

Because you and me, we've figured out a lot. There are people in the world who can make log cabins and trap rabbits for food, and more power to them: but the world is full of cunning bad guys, and it's up to us to catch them. And suddenly I was desperate to get home. Back to the big, loud, wired city, where there were messages to be read and puzzles to break and friends to impose on for just a little more work: a whole world-my world-that I was letting slide.

*

I don't know why it was just then that it hit me like a bullet through the heart that I would never see my mother again.

*

I could turn off my eyes and she wouldn't come back, I could abandon my console and she wouldn't come back. I had lost Mephista and Abuela, left my apartment and my life, and still she hadn't come back, because the truth was, she was gone, and no blind sacrifice of the heart was going to call her to me. Even now, when so many things hurt so much.

I collapsed at the side of the trail, and I cried like I've never cried before. Like the whole grey Pennsylvania sky was crying through me . . . I huddled there, gasping and shaking, crying so hard. Grief running through me like a flooding river, bursting the banks. The world twisting me like a rag and wringing out more tears than I knew I had. Giant whooping gasps and sobs.

And finally I stopped, and lay there in a puddle on the side of the road, trembling.

The rain kept falling. I lay there in the mud, still as moss. The grief I had been running from drummed down on me, slow and steady, soaking me through. And I was finally too tired to run from it. Empty enough to take it into my body.

*

When I finally staggered to my feet, I started walking home. And now I'm back.