I haven’t been home since the semester began. It’s not far, about a two hour drive. But I want to imagine I don’t have one for awhile. I’m trying to feel like people I’ve heard about in songs—the strangers with nowhere to go back to. I’ve met some of these people. I usually don’t like them.

Cody was sitting at a picnic table at the in front of the Courts. He was waiting for some buddies to pick him up and take him to West Virginia. They were going to party there.

I didn’t know who he was. I had never seen him before. He was my age, maybe a little older. His jeans and t-shirt were worn and hung off him like they were dirty.

My contour was parked right in front of him and its brakes had been acting up that fall. I was lying on the concrete looking for spots of red brake fluid. There weren’t any. I got up and was dusting my jeans off when Cody asked what was wrong.

I said the brakes were soft. I popped the hood and he got up off the picnic table and eyed the fluids. I needed new brake fluid.

“That’s all burned up,” he said. I told him I was trying to drive to Oakland that night.

“Some new fluid will get you there,” Cody told me. I had no suspicions about him at first.

I drove to Napa with the afternoon sun in my eyes and Cody in the passenger seat. His arms had burns on them. Circular cigarette burns and longer ones that looked like the burns from the flat side of a blade. He told me he was from Washington County. His buddies would be here sometime to take him to WVU.

The brake fluid didn’t work and as night fell, his friends never showed up. Cody had nowhere to go. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him he couldn’t sleep on my couch that night.

The next day he watched me eat in the dining hall and then he showered in the locker room. I was nervous about him. The idea of him was unsettling. He was a stranger, but not a stranger in the sense of someone I don’t know. He was a different kind of person all together. Cody was alone.

I think of myself as on my own, by myself. I can listen to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and feel like that’s me somehow. But I don’t know what it means to be on my own; I have a meal plan and a dorm. Dylan quit college, hitchhiked to New York, and slept on people’s couches. Alone in the universe.

I’m alone in the university. I admire Dylan greatly, but in those days he would have made me uneasy. I would have let him sleep on my couch for the same reasons I let Cody.

I didn’t like Cody because he had no clear purpose, not because he was alone. The identity home provides has become less important to me because I want my purpose to transcend my home. I will be a writer. It’s how I rationalize feeling alone. That might be what kept Dylan in New York until he became who he is. I hope it can do the same for me.

I don’t know if Cody ever made it to West Virginia.

Later that night, I dropped him off at a GetGo on Route 70. It was a few miles before the place he said his friends were. But I got the feeling like it was going to be “just a couple more miles” for many more miles.

“I’m not going any farther,” I said, as I pulled under the bright lights. “These brakes are still soft.”