A critical and important question: when you walk, where do you look exactly?

Do you scan a few inches beyond your toes, tracking the placement of one foot in front of the other, or do you gaze five or six steps in advance, as if a commando sensing danger just beyond the next hill.

_{(Feel free to stand and take a walk if you aren't sure, because this detail may shape whether you define this as a comedy or a tragedy).}

This is a love story, don't be fooled.

That said, I should forewarn you: it includes ketchup.

So I can understand if the love part may seem unclear.

Our love story begins at a gas station, because we all know that's where great love stories truly begin (and often end). It's June 2020, the earliest days of Covid, and Sarah and I have decided on an adventure of sorts: driving from Boston to Florida.

Of course, we'd avoid humans at all costs; we'd sneak into the unlocked back doors of hotels to find bathrooms; we'd make the trip in two days, spending one night camping in a stranger's field in North Carolina.

Mostly we imagined a mashup of a rom-com and an idyllic buddy movie: safe in our two-person bubble, making our way through the terrorized world around us.

For twenty hours in the car, yes you'd carefully choose the clothing you'd drive in.

And yes you might make a thing of it.

Maybe your very favorite light gray Theory sweatpants topped by a navy cotton Duer t-shirt.

Loose. Comfortable. Favorites one might say.

You'd add in brand new socks - white as chicklets - and baby blue Adidas, laced loosely to maximize blood flow.

Five hours into the trip, Sarah and I pull into a gas station off of 95 in New Jersey. We're hyped up, preparing to engage other humans as if thieves planning a heist. It'll be a smash and grab of sorts, our two-person team donning N-95s, rushing the convenience store, snatching beef jerky and seltzers in one fell motion, flinging dollar bills on the counter while somersaulting out the front door. Stopwatches set for twenty seconds, zero breaths taken.

It's go time. We exit our socially distanced car, and begin the long walk. Cars idle at the pumps, everyone on high alert. We're halfway, when - POP! - the snap of a firework, or maybe the break of a branch.

What's that!?

We startle like pigeons in a park. We feel rain, like the flourish at the beginning of a storm - but when we look skyward, there's only glorious blue sky and the sun blinking back at us from eleven o'clock.

Time drips, a slow-motion crank of confusion, until Sarah breaks the trance, laughing, innocently at first (I have to assume), then with a dose of evil that would be welcomed at the gates of hell.

Her gaze is drawn to me and my prized driving outfit, because it would seem I'm covered head-to-toe in tiny red splotches, as if paint flicked from a wet brush - or splattered blood from a neighbor being hit over the head with a shovel.

It's a remarkable blast radius: soles of my shoes straight up my left side: ankle, shin, knee, thigh, hip, arm, ribcage, shoulders, neck, ear, eyebrows, to the very crest of my head.

A crime scene investigator would note the distribution of the red splatter, small, near-perfect round dots on my lower half, stretching into oblong spaceships as they climb my torso.

And this is where we remind you to answer the question: where do you look when you walk?

Because the culprit here would be a one-in-ten-thousand shot, it would seem, of Sarah having stepped - with precision that couldn't be replicated in 10,000 tries - onto a small discarded ketchup pack.

Her toe placement exact and the pressure impeccable, just the smallest edge ripped open under forces too great to hold in, to spray its entire contents onto me and me only.

And while there isn't another item on the ground within a 30-yard radius, Sarah, as you might surmise, tends to walk while looking far in the distance, as if hoping to see a ship on the horizon.

Who does that?
(raise your hands, please)

Remember that my outfit was perfect. That it is the one I am to drive in for twenty hours. That I have no backup. That it's Covid and one doesn't just go into dirty gas station bathrooms to wash up.

That one is on their own, mostly, save for the love of their life, navigating together whatever road is in front of them.

Was I mad, you ask?

I'd offer only that in times like these, one can find themselves frustrated in ways hard to imagine, and that emotions might arise and burst, like, well, like the action of a smashed ketchup pack under the toe of a foot of someone who, apparently, doesn't damn well look in front of them when they walk.

I refused to change my outfit.

Mostly because this is what I was to drive in and drive in it I would. But also because it would let the ketchup pack win, and with it, in some silly world, Sarah as well. I would sanitize with Wet-Naps as best I could - to drive in silence for the next six hours, her too afraid to engage, as I fumed staring straight ahead.

Years later, we still chuckle about the ketchup packet.

Not because it nearly ruined my fancy sweatpants. And not because I spent fifteen hours driving down the Eastern Seaboard looking like I'd survived a low-budget mafia hit.

But because the best stories arise from tiny crises, and because one can derive meaning from the most unintentional moments.

I look at the next step.

Sarah keeps an eye on the next hill.

And somewhere between sits a lonely ketchup packet in a New Jersey gas station parking lot, still wishing it had ended up on a foot-long hot dog instead.