Why Can't I Stop Walking? The Poem That Became a Sci-Fi Novel

How a poem about restless walking became a sci-fi character

I wrote this poem during a period when pacing became my obsession. Not just walking, but needing to walk. It came during a time of deep emotional struggle, when sitting still felt impossible. When I sat down, images of the lost past and emotional pain felt stronger. Walking kept them away. The kind of compulsion that feels neurological, like your brain has rewired itself around movement.

I didn't know then that this restless energy would become Bruno, the protagonist of my sci-fi novel Diary of a Broken Android. Sometimes your most personal poems become your characters.

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Why Can't I Stop Walking?

For some time now, pacing endlessly inside the house has been a problem for me.

I walk to outrun the past. I walk to rush toward the future. I walk to dodge the present.

I walk to transform this house into another. To see it from the outside while staying within.

When I close my eyes, I can't stop.

Ten years back, or twelve, I was deeply hurt. I lost a piece of my resilience. And in the pandemic, I lost even more.

I need more madness to feel a spark of hope.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Mother Madness, help me stop walking. Embrace me with your blindness, with the umbilical pain.

Through the curtain, I see a woman on the sidewalk, rocking a baby while she paces, like me, back and forth, waiting for a call or something to come for her.

That calms me. Is it the spell of companionship?

I tell myself you must live enchanted to end this pilgrimage.

Psych meds blur your vision. They strip away the chaos. And you aim too clearly at reality.

So, I walk, escaping myself.

No cave awaits me. No companions of faith. I only write this sonata.

Without rhyme, because my steps mark the beat of something I should no longer do.

But I keep going, and going…

I come and go. I drink mate. I go and come. I smoke.

How did I end up here? What arms left me in this place? What deity set me adrift in a basket, to walk every day?

Is this the descent into the underworld screenwriters talk about?

No. There's no script here.

I follow no rules but this going off-key in life, while I sing to myself that I must stop.

Stop walking.

Am I trying to shed something?

I'm a spoiled, lost child. I'm a troubled deaf man. I'm a fountain without sound.

I can't stop walking, I've said it today. Maybe someone knows what makes me this way.

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From Poem to Character

When I started writing Diary of a Broken Android, I told myself I was creating pure science fiction. But Bruno's uncertainty came from mine. In the poem, I question why I can't stop walking. Is it the hurt from ten years back, the pandemic losses, or something neurological? Bruno asks the same questions about his own condition. Is it damage from the Dawson Hotel incident, or flawed neural wiring from his creation? That uncertainty, that search for the source of compulsion, went straight from poem to android.

Being diagnosed with hearing loss at 32 left me vulnerable, according to my psychologist. That late diagnosis, combined with losses I was carrying—grief that had nowhere to go—eventually erupted into this obsession with walking. Movement became my escape when everything else felt too heavy to bear. Bruno was left with this same restlessness after his trauma, that compulsion to move just to keep functioning.

For years, I knew something was different about me but couldn't name it. Bruno faces the same uncertainty. He doesn't know if other androids suffer like he does, if his compulsions are normal or a malfunction. That not-knowing, that isolation of being different without understanding why, is something we share.

The Dawson Hotel Incident

In Diary of a Broken Android, Bruno references what I call "the incident at the Dawson Hotel"—a moment that fractured something already fragile in him. It mirrors those lines in the poem: Ten years back, or twelve, I was deeply hurt. I lost a piece of my resilience.

Writing fiction is painful, but it also helps you cross the gap. Sitting down to write is the opposite of walking aimlessly. Maybe all that restless walking was just looking for a way through something.

People pace when they're on the phone—maybe they're searching for the person they can't see. My restless walking was different, trying to escape pain, but maybe I was also searching for a way through it.

Bruno's compulsive walking began with these steps I took through my house. But his journey goes deeper. In the latest chapter, we finally discover what shattered him at the Dawson Hotel—and why he can't stop moving.

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If you haven't already, read Day 4 to see how his restlessness began.

Day 5 is coming soon.