The summer I left the city, I carried nothing but a notebook and a cup of coffee poured slow at the station counter. By noon I was paddling a borrowed canoe across a lake so still it held the whole sky. The river led me on, winding through the green valley like a thought I couldn't finish, until the mountains rose up, wrapped in cloud. I slept beside a waterfall that talked all night, and walked at dawn into an old forest where the light arrived in pieces. Higher up there was already snow on the pines, and at the treeline a fawn watched me pass without fear. A farmer's daughter pressed a bowl of wild strawberries into my hands, and her small dog followed me for a mile before turning home. I never found what I was looking for. I found the road instead.