Walter met his first

girlfriend

after moving to

Westcity

because of his habit of taking afternoon walks. No matter how hot it got he vowed to take a walk during the afternoon when his brain would be fried anyhow. No point in trying to pull of any

deep work

during that time.

He worked from home, and because his apartment was two blocks down one of the nicer parks in town this was an easy habit to maintain. Good landscaping there. The designer knew what they were doing. The walking path was routed in just the right spots so that you'd get the shade from the super old, large

trees

that lived there.

It's funny he thought about this one day. That the trees lived at the park. That made it sound like the trees could be elsewhere. As in he lived at his apartment but worked at the city. But it was still true. The trees were at the park, but also lived there. What else would they do besides living?

These walks made him think of a lot of things. Random thoughts seemingly unrelated to each other except for the fact that it was he who was having them. Depending on his mood and the different stimuli for that day different flavors of thoughts would beckon him.

What he was fixated on the day he met Sylvia, who would end up becoming his first Westcity girlfriend, were thoughts about

life

: what made something alive or not alive?

He had never thought about this before. What really was the essential distinction between something that was alive and something that wasn't was when one day he took his

car

out for the first time in awhile. There was a grocery store near his house that he biked to. In fact he biked or walked nearly everywhere. He'd have to boot up his

Ford

Fiesta every ten days or so.

That's what his father told him. That you couldn't let a car sit in the garage too long. Oil and other stuff would buildup in the engine or something. He couldn't remember.

He didn't have a garage. Just parked on the street. But he practiced his dad's advice and took the Fiesta out for a short stroll. During that time he'd listen to a few songs and remember just how much he loved driving. He sometimes wished he had a place that he had to drive to, though he did enjoy working remote.

On the day Walter met Sylvia he had happened to take the car out for a stroll. He listened to

Travis Scott

and saw that his gas tank was finally running below the quarter mark. He would have to fill it up soon so he decided to just fill it up then.

It had been over two months since he fueled his Fiesta. He wished that humans were like that. Why couldn't you simply turn a human off when they weren't in use, and then turn them back on only when they had to do something. You could save so much money on

food

, which turned out to be human fuel. Cars were nice that way. Touch a human and they were always so hot -- around 98 degrees F. Touch a car and it would just be the ambient temperature unless it was or had recently been running it's engine.

That would be nice on a human wouldn't it? He was so sick of having to spend almost a thousand dollars a month on food. Just be like a car then you don't have to eat, he told himself.

And that's when the distinction between that which is alive and that which is not came to him. Things that are live cannot be turned off. They have a cadence that moves with the passing of time, and this can never be ceased. Whereas you could drive a car minimally, ceasing the degradation of its engine.

A human was like a car with an engine you could never turn off. From the day you were conceived to the moment of your heart's final beat, you were alive. On. The engine rumbling. Fuel needed. Constantly.

He was so much in his head that he when he got out of his car he didn't recognize that there was a truck approaching behind in the middle of the street. It veered left at just the right moment and nearly hit him. He was at a loss for words. He expected the driver to get out and yell at him but it just went on it's way with a light honk.

"Woah, you okay there?" a girl walking on the sidewalk said.

"Yeah. Nothing."

"You should pay more attention, when you're on the road that is."

"I should. Today's not a normal day for me."

"What about it?"

"Long story. Maybe I'll tell you another--. say you wouldn't happen to be hungry would you?"

"I could eat a horse."

"Then let's go find one." Walter said with a smile. And that's how their first date began.