A Thousand Roads

Stepping out onto a thousand roads, you were led by the bottom of your feet. The tips of your bare toes conducted an orchestra – guiding every movement and sensing every direction. They are the first to feel the wind brush against them and the furthest away from the mind’s intonation. The world slowly dimmed itself turbid until all that remained was the marshmallow grass, the gooey, chocolate mud, and the concrete creases. All that was left was powdered sugar ice, butterscotch-colored beaches and the gravel – sticky, prickly peanut brittle scattered across the path. Your feet skipped like stones across the rivers of asphalt as all fault was lost – caught somewhere between the warmth of the sun’s heat reflecting up from beneath, and the warmth of some atmospheric unnameable reflecting down and in and in all.

Suddenly, you heard a distant sound. It started soft but grew in tension and intensity until it was felt in your chest. The orchestra decrescendoed and direction became unclear. The rise and fall of the mind’s voice no longer felt so distant across the body. The haunting clarity of everything rushed forward and your feet lifted off of the ground humiliated. Everything that was once beneath them was stolen away like a dried-up ocean. The pattern of your steps was gone.

The sensations dulled. The noises grew and grew while eliciting memories, self-awareness, self. Harshly systematic, your eyes opened to an alarm clock and a new morning. Conscious. But something was different. Something felt deeply sad.

You miss the thousand roads.

Slowly, you sit up in bed and return your feet to the ground, a wooden floor. You slowly wiggle your toes across the grains of the wood and feel their Braille-like structure trying to say something. And for the first time, you hear.

And as you walk out the front door, you sense that something has changed. Purpose? Conviction? You don’t quite know what to call it – like truth without a description. You know you probably can’t find the thousand roads. After all, that was just a dream and now you are wide awake.

“But,” you think, “just maybe…I can find one.”