Word: vagabonde
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...friends from Harvard, most of them ensconsed elsewhere, usually Oxford or Cambridge, and just down for the weekend, or otherwise passing through the great city, often with a Harvard traveling fellowship. Most of these people looked unshakably secure to us, or at any rate free of the semi-vagabond-age that then enclosed us. They had directions in which they were traveling, and positions to which they would return. I wouldn't have called them especially happy, but they were certainly complacent; they were, with an exception or two, contented enough, or perhaps not dissatisfied enough, to alter or even...
Seeking to escape a childhood of drudgery, Anna married a tough young vagabond named Big Karl whom she met at a barn dance. He promised freedom and adventure, but the dream went unrealized: for seven years she followed him up and down Norway, always adrift and usually starving. She worked at various times as a farmhand and lumberjack, only to watch him disappear and squander her money...
...Ruth is a woman governed by chance the way I am, I don't tell her that she is a vagabond, and part of my matrix of futures that will never come true, part of my fall. When we say goodbye and she is gone, the future I created from her goes with her; there is nothing to replace it. When I knew where I was going our shared past was something tangible. Our two futures are an illusion now and they overshadow our presents...
Because Ruth is falling too. I see in her vacant eyes, not the shadow of romance that I once gleaned from a vagabond, but a true mirror of my own eyes. Ruth looks at me and asks herself. Did I jump or did I fall, She looks at her future and seen that I am not part of it. Our two futures are an illusion, Trapped in between our past and nothing, falling through space, we conspire to kill the present...
Ruth and I are suspended in time, not the time of the vagabond, but a time without issue. When we learn to control our fall, we may once again take hands and lead each other over the brink, eyes wide open. But there will have been a succession of days, days without meaning, false spring days, that are overland with our nonexistent futures. And however controlled our flight, those days will be a part of our nonexistent past. We will never again let the vagabond pass into our lives, and, carefree, pass out again...