Left, right, left, right, left…left. I’m conscious of the number of steps I take between each crack in the sidewalk, trying to alternate so the same foot doesn’t step over a crack twice. I know it’s silly, even the wind knows it’s childish, whisking past my ear as if remembering the days when a little girl in her flamingo pink slicker would hop across the sidewalk squares, pulling a laughing mom along, father following silently, invisible. The wind picks up now, reminding me of the cold bite that will soon overstay its welcome. I can see it in the leaves, beginning to change in clumps at a time, giving the feathery trees the look of a lingering timid blush. Time is moving too quickly. Soon it will be winter, then the leaves will open their doors to welcome us to spring and just as quickly, it all ends. And with the approaching humidity of a blue sky summer I will have to say good-bye to my stint as an exploratory undergrad, and hope that in the real world I can still use leaves as my simple markers of time and change. Not yet. I focus back on my feet, taking a bit of a half step so that my left will cross the crack. It gives me something my worry prone mind does not understand – pure concentration on one simple thing. But today it feels as if my mind is too full of uncertainty to be persuaded by the cement squares and my mom is no longer laughing beside me. There are so many things I don’t know, too many things I think I might lose.

I’m passing the wise brick house whose ivy has grown into a layer of deep green security, shielding its Victorian antiquity from the modernity that is leaking through the city. Ours is the last of the historical neighborhoods, unscarred by subdivisions and cookie cutter designs of hollow plastered clones. These houses have been my village of guardians, watching over me through their shuttered eyes and shadows of foliage on every walk for as long as I can remember.

My father walks next to me, and I forget what it means to feel that certain kind of loneliness I feel when I’m away at college, thousands of miles from home, or what for so long I’ve called home. We stride in sync because of our long legs; those that I inherited from him. It’s been awhile since we’ve done this, maybe because I haven’t been home in awhile. And here, in the neighborhood of my childhood, is the only place we ever walk together. I notice his peppered skin is even more mapped with the emotions of his life since the last time we were together. Those creases on his forehead are deeper. There are four of them, but the fourth only draws itself in when he is frowning. It looks more pronounced too. I think he’s worried; worried about me. But those eyes, those transparently blue eyes which we share - without a doubt he gave them to me because my mom bemoans that no one on her side of the family has anything but mundane brown – are clear, he looks forward to these walks as much as I do.

“You’re getting old, Dad.” What was meant to sound playful comes out with a hint of sadness.

He grins. “So are you, Jules.” When I was five, I was jealous that all my friends’ dads gave them nicknames, so together my dad and I created one for me. With him, I’m Jules, not the already more grown-up and serious Julia. “I guess it has been awhile, hasn’t it?” Sometimes I get the feeling he regrets that I went so far away to school.

“You could always come with me.”

He seems to lose his lightheartedness, and feel like he blames both of us for the empty lengths of time we go without seeing each other.

“You know it’s not my decision.” But I don’t know how to make it mine.

He shoves his hands into the pockets of his thin coat, creating a barrier and now, just as when I was little, I’m upset that I can’t – and have never been able –to – take his hand.

We walk in silence, our shoes echoing our thoughts on the cold pavement. We are no longer in sync. I wish he didn’t have to be such a dad. I take that back – I wish everyone who surrounds me would be more like the silent houses, carefully observing but never prying, offering protection but never advice-from-experience. I find myself frantically searching for a pausing device, a reprieve from reality, so I don’t have to look into the future and decide what I want, or more, what the world wants of me.

We reach the park of our small hamlet, where the blushing trees have always understood us. He leads us to our bench, where marks have worn into its chipped green paint, fingerprints of the hours we’ve spent here. In my pink-slicker days I called it the spying bench. This is where my father taught me to people-watch. He takes such pleasure out of reading the truths of peoples’ lives by capturing every detail of their appearance.

Watch how that man walks, he’d say. See how he puts one foot down exactly right in front of the other. Maybe he’s a professional tightrope walker! What do you think, Jules? See how that woman’s pulling in her bottom lip? She’s about to cry. I wonder what happened?

Maybe she misses her daddy, I said. Why else would she be so sad?

We would pass the time there, and eventually we got regulars: Theodore, the old man who always wore the grey long underwear under outrageously red shorts; Marge, the flustered soccer mom who talks to herself as she circled the park, waiting for the end of practice, who recognized us and would wave as they passed. By then, our observances became so in depth that we’d spelled out the life stories of our unaware performers before they had even reached the end of the block. Each time I wore the bench a bit more, I was convinced I looked a little crazy, just sitting there by myself, but eventually my self-consciousness melted away with each gait and patch worked face.

Today, I have little interest in the passersby. I watch my father instead. His crossed legs create a shadowed four on the brittle grass; his eyes stare straight ahead, unfocused. I know he’s intently thinking about something because he keeps rolling his thumb across the plane of his fingers, as if playing individual keys of a piano. It sounds as if he’s flipping the pages of a book; maybe he’s attaching an action to the pages of his mind he’s mulling over. Suddenly the moments of people watching and pretending houses are my immobile aunts and uncles seem impossibly distant, as if only a past memory that I have come across from an imagined childhood.

“It’s hard to believe you’re so grown up. I can only imagine what my Julia will be up to next.” It scares me that he uses my real name.

“What do you imagine?” My heart pounds as I wait for his reply. Please be something I can handle.

“I imagine a world for you,” he says, “a road trip of endless possibilities and destinations that is just beginning.” His worry lines softened as he spoke. If only I could have his confidence.

Amongst the memories of imagined childhoods, of brilliant classes that have sent me on inconclusive paths, and vignettes of well-meaning strangers, I have never found an answer to this simple yet terrifying question: What do you want to do with your life?

I want to sit on this park bench with my father forever, until there is only raw wood and no more green paint. I want him with me. I want to know I won’t leave everything – him – behind. I want him to be real.

I want to ask if this road-trip involves flat tires but I decide on a more pressing question.

“Does the girl in this world have a dad?”

He slips his arm around my shoulder. Crazy Marge passes by on her endless loop and eyes me curiously, happy to see someone else talking to herself. It’s me, crazy Julia who always sits on this same park bench and consults her non-existent father.

“Of course she has a dad,” he says. “I’m here aren’t I?” I don’t know how to answer that.

“Even as an adult? Because Mom makes it pretty clear that once I’m done with college, I’m on my own.” It irritates me, when she says this, when my nostalgic mother looks at me, no longer as her pink flamingo hop-along daughter, and sees a future I have yet to be introduced to, a future perhaps without her and certainly without him – my father. My father has never been in my future. Not from my mother’s point of view, anyway. He belongs firmly in an ambiguous past.

“She’s getting you ready and preparing herself.” He smiles, and rocks me a little closer with his curved arm, a joking twinge in his voice. “You’re her one and only Jules.”

“I’m her one and only Julia,” I remind him. “It’s only with you that I’m Jules.”

“You’re her one and only,” he affirms.

“What’s she going to do when there aren’t Christmas breaks and summer vacations to look forward to?” He lets me try to sort it out. “I’ll come home. I’ll keep coming home.” It feels more like a question rather than a confident promise. He knows I won’t. He knows me so well. I can’t stand the idea of her being alone. But I’ll be alone too.

My father watches me carefully. Does he see me dissolving?

“Your mother will be just fine.” But what about me? Do I even have a home anymore?

I’m a changing leaf. I may look tranquil – pretty, dancing on the breeze but, I’m falling, out of control into a world I’ve only ever seen from far away. I’ve heard it’s good luck to catch a falling leaf, but there are too many and not even my dad can catch me. Can’t I just float forever?

“And you?” I say, “What happens to you when I’ve gone and left you behind?”

Gently, he touches the tip of his index finger to my temple and envelops me in the blue, blue eyes, my one inheritance from him, the only tangible proof of his existence. “It’s up to you when you’ll see me, but you know Jules, I’ll always be near. Near home.”

He stands and holds out his hand to pull me up. “Come on, let’s get you – ”

“Home?” I interject, though I’m not sure where that home is anymore.

He can read the question on my face. “Home is wherever you want it to be,” he says. “You know that, Jules, right?”

And then, as he says this, I do know. I can be my own home. In my memories, my mind, my heart, I can find the answers I need.

As the wind pushes us along the paths of my collage of imagined realities, the leaves become paradigms of my childhood, following their own directions along the paths created by the wind. My father is beside me, always t

here, and then gone, then back again, at least for now. “Same time tomorrow Jules?” I nod, memorizing him. His eyes, the creases on his face. There is so much I will never know about him.

And then I am by myself again, my loneliness faded, like the worn patch on the wooden bench I’ve just left behind.

I walk alone, back to the home of my memories and imaginations, through the solace of my childhood, and realize that anywhere, no matter where I go, there will always be cracks in the sidewalk.