I Took a Walk Today

I took a walk today.

I got up from my chair and walked down the hall between cubicles. People were in some of them. They were reading their monitors or typing something or staring with consternation at a piece of equipment shoved in amongst their books and papers and parts and things.

I turned left at the wider hallway. It ran between larger fields of cubicles, each with narrower corridors that angled past in my peripheral vision like the rows in a tomato field alongside the freeway. Only a lot more slowly.

I turned right at the windows and walked between them and the cube farm. Someone I’ve never seen before smiled and said, Hello. I smiled back and kept walking. I stopped in the corner of the building where the windows converge. I stood in the corner and looked down at the parking lot.

It was in a bath of cold winter sunshine. Cars and trucks gleamed, but not so much, because they all needed washing. By something more effective than rain or shine.

Off in the distance the land north of the river formed a silhouette of trees and houses. To the right snowy mountains peaked above the foothills. To the left the coast range was a distant shade of blue. Between me and all these places there were trees and buildings and streetlights and cars that needed washing.

I turned right and walked along the windows. In the cubicles to my right, people were talking, sometimes to each other, sometimes on the phone. They sounded like they knew what they were talking about. I had no idea.

At the wall where the conference rooms and the stairs and the elevators and the bathrooms form the building’s core, I turned right again. It was darker here, between walls and cabinets. At the end I turned right one last time, back into the light. I passed people going either to or going fro, ‘twas hard to tell, and turned left back into my little hallway, and went between people having a conversation and sat down again in my chair.

It was a nice walk.