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This brief title-like page frames what follows as a memory or section about the time before departure.

Because it is so short, the page functions almost like a threshold. `Before the Road / WE went` suggests an origin point before movement, travel, or exile. The phrasing is awkward in a way that feels deliberate, as though the road is already rearranging syntax before the journey begins.

A bare threshold page: the title 'Before the Road' followed by 'WE went.' It functions as a structural divider in the manuscript, marking the hinge between the boyhood-and-neighborhood material and whatever the road brings. The clipped 'WE went' reads as both a section label and a sentence already in motion, the uppercase 'WE' keeping the gang as the collective subject.