Journey

 I’ve been taking walks for as long as I can remember. It started when I was around 7 or 8, and I would take walks to sneak out of my Grandparent’s dinners. This year, I took a walk during thanksgiving dinner. Nobody noticed. The great thing about living in a city is that there aren’t a lot of places you can’t walk. And when you designate that time to thinking, you get a lot of it done. 

 Whatever has been going on in my life, I’ve been able to walk away from it for about an hour and consider it. Failures, successes, deaths, breakups. It’s all relative. I can think about it and process it and make myself believe that I’m better because of it.

 It wasn’t until we said goodbye one last time that I realized how her nose wrinkled when she cried. I had seen it happen dozens of times over the years, but nothing helps you gain an appreciation for something like watching it disappear as you sit underneath a motel awning. 

 Our relationship wasn’t sexual. It was a true friendship. But neither of us could appreciate that. We outgrew each other like a kid outgrows their favorite shirt: quickly and unwillingly. We didn’t want to get rid of what we had built, but it was collapsing on itself and if we didn’t get out soon we would be crushed by its sheer weight. If only the base hadn’t been playing cards. 

 To be honest, I only left because she left. I yelled her name a few times, and I cried for a few hours when I knew it was over, but I accepted the fact that I had to leave. Even then, though, I tried to get her to come back to look at what we had built, but she wanted nothing to do with me.

  It wasn’t until we said goodbye one last time that I realized how her nose wrinkled when she cried. I had seen it happen dozens of times over the years, but nothing helps you gain an appreciation for something like watching it disappear as you sit underneath a motel awning. 

 Our relationship wasn’t sexual. It was a true friendship. But neither of us could appreciate that. We outgrew each other like a kid outgrows their favorite shirt: quickly and unwillingly. We didn’t want to get rid of what we had built, but it was collapsing on itself and if we didn’t get out soon we would be crushed by its sheer weight.
 To be honest, I only left because she left. I yelled her name a few times, and I cried for a few hours when I knew it was over. But I accepted the fact that I had to leave. Even then, though, I tried to get her to come back to look at what we had built. She wanted nothing to do with me.

 It took me a little while before I started going on my walks again. I found myself unable to do it, though, without some sort of inanimate companion. I was getting too distracted by my thoughts and  surroundings. I’ve always prided myself as being comfortable in my own skin, but for the first time I was itching to get out of it. My thought process is very forward. That’s why the walk is so beloved. If my body was moving onward, so was my mind. In my walks, I was usually able to maintain internal sidebars without letting them derail me, but now this was not so. I would try to think and my stomach would possess an empty feeling that could not be filled with food. So I just wouldn’t think. And eventually my brain would fill with thoughts that were supposed to be had, and I would feel the need to light a cigarette or listen to a song just so that I wouldn’t have to be by myself. 

It wasn’t just my internal watch that noticed a change, though. It was the physical world around me. The trees seemed to be thinning, and the sky was further away. The river didn’t meander the same way that it did before. I was not naive enough at the time to think that I was changing nature, though I was not sure of what was happening. It scared me, certainly. But I kept walking.

 I kept walking until I couldn’t recognize the buildings. This bothered me more than it probably should have. It’s obtuse to think that one could know all of the buildings in an international city. Still, this new territory did not jive with the theme of my walks. I stopped in a diner and got a very angry cup of coffee from an impatient waitress. It was like she knew that I didn’t belong there. Like I was disease. A vagrant. A stowaway.

 There was a point, though, where we made eye contact. I want to believe that she saw the fear and confusion in me, because her face softened for a second. I know she felt a connection, because she turned around almost immediately and returned with my change. I left a tip, but I don’t know why.

 The wind began to nip. I zipped up my jacket and kept walking until there weren’t any more buildings. It was just houses. This made me feel a little better. It’s not strange for houses not to be familiar. It doesn’t matter much though, because soon the houses were gone too.

And then nothing was around me anymore.

  I looked down at the road that had been supporting me and found that it was there no more. I looked back to see when it had left me, but could not see that far. There’s comfort to know that one does not always need a road to walk on, but it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that the road eventually stops serving a purpose. 

I got home eventually. My legs were cold and I wanted to got to bed. The walk had fixed me, for I had not felt tired in days. Although one thing that perplexes me to this day is that there was no point in the walk that I remember turning around. I’m still not sure whether or not I turned around at the point in which nothing was around me, or if I just kept going forward.