Sifting through memories: sitting on a rocky beach, gaze alternating between the Kerouac pressed open against my knees and the fantastical mushroom expanding in slow motion across a lake I remember being as smooth as sea glass (though the photos prove this false). An ex once told me I was restless; I thought she was wrong. I thought I was good at sitting still and quiet by still and quiet lakes, and yet here I was, careening across the country on Kerouac’s trail, burning the vapor of some primitive will to movement. In the book, Kerouac was in the back of the blonde Minnesotans’ truck, ripping through Montana, where we’d just been. He was looking for something, you could tell, but he never said what. Another memory— the ferry, last days in the east. Another— the coast, inaugural days in the west, digging my toes in beneath the first inches of the pacific. The pacific–it should’ve been the edge, the end, Manifest Destiny expended, but already I was turning away, looking south to new lands, wondering what else there could be. Kerouac goes to Mexico. In the book, that’s the endgame. His store of ostensible reasons to travel runs dry, but he goes and goes anyway. They say the perpetual motion machine can’t exist, but it does: in every spirit that lacks, every soul that needs something it cannot name.