Once there was man who lived inside the big "O" at the beginning of this sentence. He grew rapidly from a dot into something a little like a boy and a little like a man. He lived among the horsey pastures and grassy lots of the Alphabet City. He never knew quite what was going to happen next because no one does in places like that. So he decided to get married. After deciding this, he walked across a wooden bridge with his fiance. The bridge was fresh, the wood was green, his boots made clumping noises that echoed mildly down on the rippling surface of the creek below. The sun was hot and dusty bouncing off the backs of little dusty insects hazing around in the slowmoving air. Then later he decided not to get married and it was a pain but he got out of it. That night he slept soundly and late, and his body made a firm impression on the good clean sheets of his bed, in his apartment that surrounded him like a cheerful coccoon. He woke when the sunshine came tapping on his window, and he started a new life. He moved out to a big "M" somewhere in a paragraph far far away, and got a shitty job and started to get depressed. It was there that he drank a mocha-flavored malt out of a styrofoam cup, and walked somewhat heavily up a great stone set of stairs, up a long sidewalk beside a bridge over a scrubby ravine, and home from work every day to his hovel populated by demons, angels, and a dog that kept watch over him even though he didn't know it at the time. He petted the dog. The dog's hair was orange, like sparks from some fire made by good magic in the early afternoon. Then he moved again; he was running from something, he didn't know what. While on the run he drove a car with a loud engine, so loud it set his teeth on edge, and a ribbly, bumply cover on the steering wheel that felt good and rough and smooth against his hands, kind of like he remembered the feeling of rocks in the creek pushing strongly against his bare feet back in the days when he ran more free like the creek itself. His life had gone from being a certain bend in a little river, with certain shifting gravel, and the cycling lives of lilies and nettles, [and the shade of sycamore trees,] to being a strange misty droplet all but lost in a hazy busy hot cityscape, full of the random gyrations of sirens, the crazy orderly deathmarch of automobiles. And then he fell in love. That day he had a ham sandwich that was delectably plain, on cheap spongy wheat bread with mayonnaise spread smoothly on one side, mustard squirted sparingly on the other, ham raggedly piled on, then some meunster cheese sliced in thin little chunks, some unidentified greens that were cheaper than lettuce and tasted a little funny but not bad and definitely full of character, and a side of baby carrot sticks whose tender eagerness to be eaten was the perfect companion to a sandwich that sometimes wanted to slide apart, some plain, cheap, salty potato chips, and echinacea tea because he was just getting over a cold. Then he and his new love grew up together some more, and they finally got married and laughed and made love and talked and fought and god knows what else they did. Through it all he had a funny ache in his heart. He didn't know what to call it but it was the ache of being alive, of yearning towards the pulse of life the way the autumn air yearns toward fire and smoke and cozy new clothes worn to school, the way the summer yearns toward boats and the slippery abandon of waterslides and thrashing about in this one certain bend of the creek where the gravel bar slides right down to the swimming hole, and certain fish nibble lovingly at your legs if you stand still long enough. Someday they too would die, but there would be plenty of time for that.