I walk in Cleveland. Ten to twelve miles a day, depending. What it depends on, depends on the day: weather, route, how long I can keep the deflated balloon that floated over from the neighbor kid’s party in the air. I started walking for something to do. I was looking for some stimulation. There’s only so much I can see from my window. Claire, cutting her hair on our shared stoop. Weeds I won’t pull in my lawn. Bruce across the street, mowing his again. We’re all in negotiation with the passage of time. All trying to figure the answer to a question: when life as we knew it was halted by widespread network outages, were we all meant to stop, too? Or is this intermission now our life? I could walk one way and never stop. A pilgrimage, of sorts, without a destination. For the sake of the sacred walk itself. For now, I practice seeing. The number of hummingbirds is increasing (from new birdwatchers, their mason jars of sugar water). The sidewalk is strewn with fat worms from all the rain. There are signs. Not the metaphysical kind—actual signs. DO SOMETHING, MAYOR, and WHERE IS MY FENCE? Somehow, this feels more effective than bitching online. A middle-aged man without a shirt rides his stationary bike in his driveway. He doesn’t need to go anywhere. People come to him, ask about his fence, and put signs in their own yards. The number of people outside is astonishing. Like the time the solar eclipse passed over Cleveland. There was drinking in the street. Everyone cheered for the moon. It’s been this way since the first network outage. After the chaos—crashes of all sorts: planes, systems, markets—came a long silence. Then came the itch. We went outside to confer with our neighbors. Before we could figure what it was or how to scratch it, the network was live again. It was hard to figure who to blame. There was talk of solar flares, of targeted attacks, incompetence. It almost didn’t matter. We could text, post, call again, and we had something to talk about. We kept posting things like: I can still feel the silence in my middle ear; and It all seems like an improbable dream; and What even WAS that? During the second outage, which lasted only a week but seemed much longer, we carried our phones in our pockets for the weight of them. We scrolled the air with our fingers. We wrote notes and doodled memes for our friends. They piled up on our kitchen tables, to forward when the network returned. By the third, we’d exchanged addresses. The postal service got their shit together fast. It was like their renaissance. Most everyone and everything prepared to move offline for a time. This is when I started walking. I started by counting my steps. Time, it seemed, had almost stopped. Or maybe it had stopped for a while. Maybe I was just now feeling it, the amorphous blob of time. I wanted to feel its geometry. My steps gave time a shape, a forward movement. They gave my walks a purpose. I had a cousin who called herself a walking influencer. She recorded her outfits, her urban hikes through Seattle. I called it not having a car. I wonder if she still walks without anyone to watch her. I wonder if she narrates her walks for herself. I stopped counting my steps. I decided it wasn’t my business. Time is on our side, if we let it be. Now my days are measured by birdsong and clover patches. I know my neighbors, and they know me. People speculate in the street about when and whether it will go back to normal. I make a sign to put in my yard: NORMAL IS HOW IT IS. I don’t stay put long enough to talk about it. The network is up, will go back down, and I will keep walking through it all. Everyone waves.