I played the guitar hours a day. It began to take on the comforting lull of routine, of something I didn't need to think about. I needed something to comfort me.

I accepted the fact that I'd think about Craig. Of course I would. I thought about him tied up in the disappointment in myself. What was more important than being a father? And I had screwed it up.

I had said to him that night outside the restaurant, "you always screw up," and I'd meant it when I said it. I meant all the times he was late and he lied, all the times he disobeyed. The anger in his gaze, the tears in his eyes, we were not connecting. We'd never connect again. He threw it back at me, that I was the one who screwed up. He was right.

Hotel rooms, laying low, practicing chords and scales and simple songs, intermediate songs. Gliding toward the complex and the complicated songs, Marty impressed with my progress. Of course he was. When the full power of my intellect shone upon some endeavor everyone was impressed.

I got contact lenses and hair dye, blond. It wasn't exactly a disguise. I liked looking in the mirror and seeing a different version of myself. This person had never taken a belt to his son, had never caused the sharp fear and the pleading, pleading I could still hear on the edges of sleep and when I woke up, not fully conscious, 'please, dad, no, please, I'm sorry…'

I walked to my lesson, the guitar in its case. I walked everywhere, took public transportation. Maybe I should get a car. It wasn't clear so I didn't. Traveled from one hotel to the next, each one just a bit closer to Vancouver. I was staying here for my lessons with Marty, his faded blue eyes resting on the notes on the page, his fingers skillfully picking them out on the strings. I was waiting until I'd wrung everything out of Marty that I could, every last bit of knowledge in my newly chosen profession.

The time to move on had come, and I thanked Marty and paid him. He nodded at me, a benevolent smile on his face. I ducked my blond head, blinked around my new contact lenses. What was Craig doing now? The thoughts of him came out of the blue, came at me like birds in a Hitchcock movie. I picked up my guitar and moved on.

Nights in the hotel rooms were the worst. Nothing to do, the guitar feeling heavy in my hands. I smoothed the thin material of the bedspread with my hands, clicked through the channels of nothing to watch. I was all alone with myself, but that was the lot I'd chosen.

Time to go to Vancouver. I took the bus, slept in the gentle back and forth motion as it ate up the road from Toronto to the west coast. Pacific sunsets, soft air, the landscape indescribably changed. It was time to go. I couldn't risk seeing Craig.

I was proficient enough at the guitar to play in a band, and upon arrival in Vancouver I set about finding one. I'd hardly talked to anyone since I'd left Craig that night, just hotel clerks and Marty. It might be nice to build relationships again, to bridge the silence between me and the world. It might be nice.

I wandered out into the streets filled with fliers tacked to street lights, little pleas for roommates or dog walkers and multiple tabs of the same phone number fringing away from the papers like a little skirt. Among these I saw the plea for a guitarist and I ripped off the tab with the phone number and tucked it into the pocket of my leather coat.

Wandering. This was something I had never done in my previous life of scalpels and patient appointments. Then, I had been focused, directed, goal oriented. I felt the wind in my bottle blond hair, grabbing at the gelled edges. My internal jury was still out about wandering. Just going where the tide or the breeze took me, it was almost disorienting. Being dead did seem to have certain freedoms.