It was by some total miracle of fate that the streets were the emptiest they'd ever been. It was the deepest relief, the closest thing to ecstasy I've felt in the past few years—even if pigeons could recognize me, what were they gonna do about it? I was a boy untethered. Natasha, much as I appreciated shooting the breeze with her, was more than enough people in town knowing I was around. Maybe it's a shit thing to do, I thought. The amount of people I probably…

I didn't want to think about it any longer. That was then, this is now. I was still just barely convinced that "then" and "now" were more than a couple minutes apart even after everything I just learned, but that's what I had to keep this burned into my brain for, this memo that there was no going back. It would help me process the gap.

That was the reason.

I couldn't help but stare at the ground, at every individual speck in the pavement passing beneath my worn-out sneakers. It was the most that I felt I could handle looking at in the moment, with these unbearably sharp eyes of mine, and even then it still seemed to cut into my retinas a little. I thought about how I looked from the outside, my head hung low, my pace a glacial crawl like there were weights in my shoes, my hands jammed into the pockets of my jeans—it looked like some sort of walk of shame, didn't it.

Pigeons don't understand what shame is. I think. I wasn't ashamed, anyway.

When I did bother looking up occasionally, it just reminded me of something Natasha had said, before I flaked on her: she kept seeing my face everywhere she looked. I doubted she meant it so literally, though. Every few feet or so—on a lightly grafittied wall or clinging to some pole as best as it could—was a poster with my face and name on it, in some state of disarray, torn up or covered by myriad other things or free of its feeble little attachments and fluttering along on the breeze.

It has been two years, after all.

It had to sink in at some point. Two years. Two years. Two. Fucking. Years. To the day. 730 days. It was a stupid thing to ask who was "right" about the amount of time they experienced, me or the earth—there wasn't even an up or down in space, how could there be a right or wrong? But it made me think regardless.

I still felt itchy around the temples and behind the ears from having worn my glasses earlier, a little around my right hip from putting them in my thin pants pocket mere hours-for-me ago. (It was a bad habit of mine, knowing full well I was allergic to them and putting them there anyway, and they were lightly jostling around in my sweatshirt pocket now—slightly more fabric separating them and my paranoid skin.) And yet there was the wear and tear all around me, of my likeness, in stark black and white.

Holy fuck. My date of birth is on those posters. I'm supposed to be 17 now, and I'm not. At least I didn't feel 17, whatever that even meant. I was hardly even sure I felt 15, for that matter. At the moment I just felt on standby, like a blank slate, a glass whose contents had been poured into the sink. Maybe one of us was wrong about time after all—my existence was now a contradiction of basic arithmetic.

Goddamn, I wish I was a pigeon. They don't have to worry about things like this. There I was, thinking about those little guys again. It kept my mind light. They just had bird things to worry about. Bread and where to get it, or something. They lived small-scale lives. Short ones.

If a pigeon somehow got into my situation, half its pigeon friends probably be dead when it came back.

I stopped dead in my tracks, gave my hands something to do. I tied my hair back, took my hoodie off and slung it over my shoulder. It was very little, but it wasn't nothing.

What was wrong with my brain? What crime had I committed against it for it to see fit to torment me like this? Even pigeons. Even fucking pigeons weren't safe. Think of anything else, I told myself, think of literally anything else.

There wouldn't be much about that one pigeon to change? Try again.

Your parents. Go back to the dead pigeons.

You are those pigeons. To your parents, Kameron.

Shut the fuck up.

They were the first to notice. They reported you. They've definitely cried about you. What are they doing now, how do they live, have they given up? Probably. This is their normal now. You know a Kam-less life for this town means a Kam-less life for them too, right? Dumbass.

My eyes started to sting. It was probably the overstimulation. It had to be that, or else.