In Lafayette, the crickets chirp all night, like they’re preparing for war, a drum beat that never builds to a climax, only flirts with the idea. At night, you can see into the houses from the dark streets. I used to imagine people watching me from outside as I staged plays and pantomimes in my bedroom, waited for phone calls, and just started walking when the waiting was too much.

As a teenager, I would walk to the bottom of the driveway and wait for my friends to pick me up. I’d sit on the ground and when I got impatient I would start to walk down the bike lane bordering Acalanes Road. It was the same path I walked in elementary school on my way from the bus stop to my house. The bolts from the guard rail sometimes caught me on the leg, and a smell of moldy oak leaves came from behind the fence. There was a blackberry bush with ripening fruit and always a pile of dog shit.

I was 15 when I realized you could get to the hiking trails from my backyard. You didn’t need a ride, which I couldn’t have gotten anyway. Dad had left and Mom came home late. After school I would take the dog, aging and slow, not always on a leash, across the street and up the path. We would hug the sides of the road, then disappear into the driveway of a deserted house. A rental, or maybe the owners had just moved away and never looked back. We’d walk through the backyard. There was a swimming pool, murky and toxic looking, like our own. Dad was the one who took care of the pool. We would climb between ropes of barbed wire and I would guide the old dog through the thorns.

The trails went along the hilltops and fields that were in between the houses and the neighborhoods, connecting a world of back routes and alternatives. I liked this flipped around version of Lafayette; an inverse of its perfection. I liked spying on unused kidney shaped pools, kids playing soccer on the high school field below. I liked thinking I could make it through the whole town this way, on dusty cow trails, crawling between fences and slipping through cracks, unseen. It seemed like the only way I could make it through.

I’m 32 now and I don’t know anyone who lives in Lafayette. My mom moved away and I stopped talking to the girls from high school. All my past associations and connections are gone. But I still walk on those trails. I look into other people’s windows and I feel 15. I drive through town and anticipate stop signs, recognize driveways, imagine that I recognize faces. I can still point out the house on the hill where we went the last day of freshman year and drank beers in the backyard. When the cops came it was still light outside and we climbed over the redwood fence into the hills. All of us scrambling like native animals in the brush, searching for cover or higher ground or other fences to crawl over. I went over a chain link one into an elementary school soccer field. It was the elementary school I had gone to, where Calvin the janitor used to open our packets of Capri Sun with his pocket knife.

The field is still there. It is the one I found when I was 14 and half-drunk, running from the cops, and it is the one I rolled kickballs over when I was 6. It is the one I drive by on the freeway. It is intimate and strange at the same time, inaccessible but vivid, like a fenced-off memory. When I get tired of waiting, I start to walk. I walk past fences and fields and I climb through thorns. I walk through the present and I end up in the past.

Some day children will run through sprinklers and parents will send them out on their bikes to the gourmet cheese shop for a snack.  They will reach out and grab handfuls of cheese curd made from goat’s milk. But for now there’s still homeless ladies leaning against their shopping carts and the cars don’t stop at the stop signs because it doesn’t matter what you do in this neighborhood, anyway. New tenants have to take a chance if they want to move in, accept a place with a little grit and an absentee landlord who hasn’t refinished the floors in 50 years.

What I’m trying to say is this: I have good days. They are full of light and jumping into lakes from tall rocks. Other days I watch movies back to back on my computer. I let dishes pile up on my bookshelf because I am too scared to walk down to the kitchen and scrub the cereal from the bottoms of bowls where it has been stuck for two days. And the joyful days are brighter for the dismal ones. Isn’t that the way it works?