right in front of me
The note says, "Come," and I don't hesitate. I put on my orange jacket and go outside, where a carpet of daisies winds around to somewhere unseen. It is a path but also not a path. Order and also disorder. The grass below is a pulse of green. No one is around but I hear something. Or maybe it's the wind. Or just me, moving my way through the field. I look down again and the note says, "Let it out." Let what out, I wonder, and then I realize I am holding my breath. I let it out. I look down. The note says, "Now what?" and I want turn it over to get the answer but there is none. I want someone to show up like magic and give me a shopping list. I want a loudspeaker to come on, directions from Mapquest, an instruction booklet with finely rendered drawings showing me the hardware I need, my father's voice, the outlines my high school English teacher made us draft before starting our book reports. I'm looking all around, almost frantically now, for where to go and what to look for and how to move and what to say, thinking that I am behind, lost, out of touch, all wrong. And when I look down again, the paper has gone blank, and then it starts to disintegrate right in my hands, and then it's a shred of thing before it disappears entirely. Then it's just my hands, and now all I see are the lines there, arched and curved, railroad-tracked, hieroglyphs of unknown origin, and at first I think, I can't possibly read this, or understand it, but then I do, and I do.