By John Proctor
When you hung out next to the river under the bridge as a child looking at the homeless people, seeing the bed sheets they hung to demarcate territory and make pretense to privacy, running away like a scared animal when they called to you but returning regularly to watch them while pretending to fish, then passing over the bridge on your school bus to junior high and thinking about the people entering and exiting that makeshift liminal space and wanting to quit school and live with them under the bridge, or any bridge really—the bridge is not important. Soon enough the steamboat, the boxcar, the Greyhound bus, and the backseat of a stranger’s car will join it in your freedom-in-mobility mythology, not through lived experience so much as through the stories you read, and you’ll become enmeshed inescapably in Twentieth-Century American self-delusion specifically through your desire to escape it.