The following day I still was not talking.
My roommate, I'm sure, knew something was up. He may have even known I'd quit the job. If he did know, though, he wasn't saying anything either. Around 10 a.m. he chuckled briefly, fell backward on his rack, shut the windows to his soul & began snoring.
And I picked-up my pack & left. I was gone now ~ long gone ~ a long gone lover of liberty ~ and slammed the door shut, which you had to do in order to make the latch stick.
Outside, as I trudged across the compound wearing the thrice-packed back-pack, an officer of the office on an errand of one kind or another & I passed each other.
"It's laundramat day," lied I in a sardonic explanation of why I was wearing such a loaded thing on my back. I was telling nobody about leaving. I was unobtrusively sneeking away.
"It's a good time of year for that," said Ray, the office officer, eye-balling the pack on my back as we passed each other. It was a nice sunny day for sure ~ and what did he mean by, "It's a good time of year for that"? Maybe I wasn't fooling anybody. Maybe everybody was just letting me slip away quietly without any hullubulloo.
In the office I signed out: destination: "laundry." I slipped around the corner down my favorite side-street to a bus-stop down a-ways on Central Avenue. Then I boarded the city bus and disembarked downtown ~ at the train station.
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