AT THE STOA

"Mother," I asked one day, "why is my sister's name Allily, and mine, Marie Chris?" "Well," my mother answered, "it's the combination of my and your father's names." "Ah." I won't go into the second half of my question, for fear of your laughter, but thus began a small grudge towards my sister which only evaporated when we were both adults, and graduated from college. Having forgotten the question momentarily, when I was growing up, I was inseparable from her — and though there are three years between us, there was an entire year where we dressed alike and I went to her school like a lost kitten following a mother cat, sitting in on her classes, being fed answers to teachers' questions, and raising my hand like the overall moron I was. I wasn't old enough to go to school then, but when I was, I would always wait for her so we could go home together. My memory of going home with her was hazy — I didn't really

There's an Asian couple that's been walking for more than an hour, with colorful umbrellas, in front of our house. They would go to the end of the block, and then the other end, and then loop back around. They're middle-aged, as far as I can tell, and this might be their daily exercise, though I haven't seen them around before. Maybe I just wasn't looking; or they wait for days like these — overcast, cold — to hoof it. When I was younger, and still made of stronger, leaner, more single-minded stuff, I walked a lot. I remember a friend and I drinking until the wee hours of the morning and thinking of where to sleep when we realized we didn't have any more money, so we decided to walk to their place, around seven kilometers away from where we were drinking. We made it, but the sun came up, so I walked back home immediately after. In heels. Drunk. Damn my feet. "Why," you say, "shouldn't you have sensible shoes, given that you walk a lot and drin