I was walking to the doctor yesterday when I became aware of being bipedal. I am an ape, my arms hanging, swaying. Hip camber. A birth canal of restricted clearance. I see myself walking, an X-ray motion picture of bones and joints.

I remember the moment I decided I wanted to be a competent walker, bipedal extraordinaire. It was college, accompanying a professor, the head of the department in which I was ostensibly majoring, up the four precipitous flights of stairs in Neuberger Hall, to her office.

I wouldn’t call it a watershed moment. I dislike the term, but even if we’re working with it, I would say that at the time I didn’t have much of a watershed, or a poorly maintained and polluted one, or that my streams were brief and ephemeral. This was during the summer; I was heavily eroded with dry wash gullies.

My professor was pushing deliberately up the stairs like she had cogs or a ratcheting system. I was all pelvis and wrist-bones, a thoughtless concavity. But all of my pumping and flapping near her didn’t adrenalize her pace, she wasn’t tuned to my impatience, each step with Tai Chi-like precision. She reeled details of next week’s assignment like a koan, unperturbed by exertion as we passed the third floor.

When we summitted she was as serene as a goddess, whereas I had to pause heaving on the landing for a few beats before doing a hare-sprint to overtake her tortoise. She didn’t look at me as she unlocked her office door (without, I noticed, my typical jerky movements or my swearing or bangings), all sensibility and purpose, even going so far as to wear a polyester housedress and her grey hair in an maintenance-friendly pageboy.

She, I realized, was the real victor here. I was gasping and wearing platform sandals and something gauzy–this being the sole year in my life that I decided to attack my femininity by a brute force attempt at fashion that made me look like I wanted to be raped.

I was in rapturous admiration. I wanted to be everything then, I was still a teenager, but most of all, at least for five minutes, I wanted to be unflappable and constant. I wanted to be able to walk and walk and walk and be a grownup. I wonder if she noticed this or just concentrated on my most recent, wretched translation of Gogol or Pushkin.