My first thought was that I had slept thirteen of the last fifteen hours and still felt like hell. My second was that I had made the entire trip without talking to the black-pantied girl, that she was gone forever now. I lumbered up. With both hands I tried smoothing the wrinkles from my shirt. The driver shook his head.

“You have any Aleve?” I asked.

“Get off the damn bus.”

I grabbed my bag and walked off. I went around the first corner and relieved myself. I didn’t know where I was or where I needed to go. I couldn’t call my friend, Jeff, because of my broken phone. I had his address and phone number in an email but that created another problem of finding a computer with Internet.

It wasn’t as windy as I’d thought it’d be, but it was pretty damn cold, midthirties by my guess. Morning, just after eight. I didn’t own gloves. My jacket was nothing more than a black fleece windbreaker ill-equipped for Northern winters. My hand kept going through a hole in the right pocket. I’d have to find something heavier soon.

I made my way to the inner Loop and entered an Argo Tea on State and Randolph. I bought a large coffee and a muffin, sat in the corner, wrapped my hands around the steaming cup to warm them. There was a long line of people waiting to order. Businessmen and women headed to work. Students and professors headed to class. And there I was, alone and a little scared in a city I’d never been in, feeling apart from the rest of the world while headed to the couch of an old friend I hadn’t seen in eight and a half years, a friend I was nervous to see again. A friend who, for better or worse, knew who I was and where I had come from, and with that I couldn’t dispel the feeling that somehow my personal fortunes (or what there was of them, anyhow) had taken a turn for the worse.

I sighed and again tried figuring out how I’d ended up here, what concatenation of events had pushed me from New York. There wasn’t any single earth-shattering incident that served as the impetus, but more like a series of mishaps beyond my control, missed opportunities, being one of many casualties of a defective economy, and a few small fuckups along the way that in the end were tantamount to the same thing. And besides, did the reason really matter? My situation wasn’t going to change regardless of how well I understood it. Somehow I had lost my way. That’s all that really mattered.