The doctor gives me conflicting information about my heart. After this, I feel a shift in my own personal gravity. Each step is something weightier than before. On my morning walk, it is over ninety degrees. My own shadow scares me and I feel my heart rate increase, my chest tighten.

If I were my own doctor, I wouldn’t let myself walk. Still, the man in the maroon scrubs, the man who fails to make serious eye contact with me, says nothing of it. I figure that if I weren’t allowed moderate exercise, I would have been told so. Walking is good for the heart, and I am not my own doctor, so I keep going.

There is a piece of fruit on the ground. It looks like a parakeet and I am afraid to step on it. Then I pass a mauled squirrel’s mangled body on the sidewalk and think maybe I am just looking for new ways to depress myself, new ways to be unwell.

The squish of the tar beneath my sneakers implies that my foot might pass right through it at any moment. The ground and all its small corpses cannot be trusted.

I continue to walk that same path each day, hoping to dig my tread deeper into the tar each time. I’ll always do things I don’t want to do just to see how bad I can make myself feel. I’ll never learn from a mistake, if I can help it.

Still, I skirt away from the wasp buzzing at my neighbor’s fence and feel I must point out that I’ve never wanted to hurt myself physically.

Although it might not seem like it, I am already halfway through my walk. My mind moves slower than my feet. I think about turning around and retreading my path. I remember the squirrel and take a new path.

I see something else that hurts me and already I am working to forget it. I choose not to write it down and think maybe moving my body in the sunlight is enough to help this feeling pass through me.

With that shortcut I am nearly home. There is a woman selling orchids from a recycling bin on the curb. There is a well-dressed man who walks directly into the woods behind the bus stop.

The ducks remind me of the interchangeable generations of those birds which have unfolded right underneath my nose.

A lizard takes an extremely long time to skirt away from my approach. I cannot handle the sight of more dead things on the sidewalk.

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The next day, it is nearly one-hundred degrees and I rush past a wasp nestled in some nearby weeds. Then, I remember I have nothing to fear. Wasps and bees have never chased after me. I am not a flower.

I see an elderly man on a bicycle. He wears stylish shoes but no helmet. I look down for a brief moment, then look back up. He, too, is lost to the woods.

I think, how long before I wander there, too.

I keep my eye on those woods as I pass them by but nothing is illuminated for me. Today, the sign next to the pond reminds me not to feed the alligators.

I think that if there really are unseen gators there then the continued survival of every one of those ducks is a miracle.

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