The Road Well Traveled

One

All you feel is heat. Unrelenting scorch. Around you there is buzzing, perhaps cicadas, but all you see is dust. Dust and stone; not cicadas. You want to look up, but you cannot. You fear the condemnation, the shame, the scowls of disapproval, and you have no strength to look up, anyhow, for heavy is the head.

Conviviality and camaraderie to deception and manipulation to incarceration and institution to vilified recluse. Heavy is the head that bears despair.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

A quadruped, you crawl and scrape down this dusty road, your knees and your palms bloodied by and embedded with the sharp-cornered, timeless pebbles of colonists and natives and now-fossilized quadrupeds far more evolved, then, than you are, as you lumber down this dusty, steaming road of a thousand miles that began with one single scrape five minutes, or thirteen hours ago. Time is just a continuum.

You glance sideways and see the heat rising from the desolate prairie. The carrion birds have found you; their circling shadows remind you of the revolving images of constellations and planets on your childhood bedroom walls from the square nightlight atop your dresser, long, long ago when there was imagination, and so many options.

Your throat feels as cured as jerky and when you swallow something clicks behind your ear; you heave dryly, trying to summon some gastric juice to satisfy the retching, but all has been expelled. What’s left is the bloody sputum that dangles in gossamer threads from your salted lips. Something, somewhere in your malignant innards has torn from your foul summoning; your eyeballs are strained and capillaried from your visceral exertion.

Your movement from torpor has caused the bugs to scatter. No longer are they feasting on your flesh, and perhaps your tweezering from the latest onslaught will be allowed to scab. The winged things still swoop, though, and the cackles are loud.

There is thunder in the horizon, now, and you know that the sky above you is grey and moving sideways, for you no longer see your Rorschach shadow, or those of the circling birds.

You dare not look up, though, for fear of the talons and the fiendish castigation.

And even if you tried, you couldn’t look up. Your head is just too heavy.

Nine Days

There in the middle of the road is a branch, a tree branch. It is a smooth branch, polished and buffed through nature’s weathering, perhaps, though the road is lined with sawgrass, not trees. You accept the branch as an incidental, a thing that happens; you pick it up, and allow it to assist your amble.

For you are now on two legs, though very stooped.

A roadside stand has gift bags of salves, balms, and tinctures. You shuffle over to it. The stand is attended by a shadowy form in a white coat. You shield your face from being recognized. You know they’re all talking about you, wherever they are, and you know she is one of judgement. She offers you a bag before you have to ask; there is then a slight, most irregular though welcome breeze, and she dematerializes into the dust…

You have been a scribbled vertical for two days and your hands are starting to heal; your feet, though, are blistered and pussy. There is a chair next to the stand. There is a sign: Allow Yourself to Rest. You do this: you allow yourself to rest, and for the just the briefest of moments you feel like everything will be okay. You begin administering the ointments.

Your hands are no longer shaking. When you were on all fours, you did not feel the tremor due to the contact with the dusty earth, but the night before, the night the monsters were rousing, and for as long as your drying mind can remember, you’ve had those horrible, palsied tremens, like the kind your neighbor Ms. Peters had when you visited her in the elderly home with your daddy when you were seven. You asked your daddy if Ms. Peters was shaking because she was so happy to see you, and your daddy said, “Yes, son.”

You recalled that memory when your own shakes began at thirty-six, and it continued to be recalled, as a haunt, until four years later, a week ago, when Ms. Peters, with her nicotine-stained dentures and her veiny, sallow cheek bones, screeched in your face, Better Parkinson’s than DT’s you sous.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools...

You shake this off and you try to recall that fleeting good feeling of allowing yourself to rest, but it is gone. You shield yourself and look around for cover, for you are vulnerable in this wide-open space and you know you are being watched. Fear of the unknown, of impending doom washes over you, crushes you from behind like that wave the surfers dream about.

There is the road. You know you must trudge on, towards what you know not, but which is better than here.

Day Eighteen

Somewhere along the way you have acquired socks and a good pair of shoes. Above everything else, always take care of your feet, you recall reading in The Journey Motif in Literature class, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried you think. There is much you are now recalling from the alphabet soup of your life, now that your corpuscles are allowed to corpuscle from deep breathing, natural air, sunlight, contemplation…and companionship.

For on this road, you have encountered others like you. “Misfits,” if you’re still self-deprecating, but regardless: people who share your…disease? Affliction? Allergy? Curse? People of your kind, people who are on this very same road which for you, today, is not necessarily a “trudge,” but more a wary continuing.

You encounter a doctor, and recall now that it was she who gave you the balms. “You just disappeared,” you say.

“No,” she replies with a smile. “You were just coming to.”

You have encountered a brick layer, who is teaching you about foundations, and a teacher, who instructs you on listening; a lawyer, who offers free advice, and a police officer, who puts things in perspective; a farmer, who gives you a new diet, and a derelict, who reminds you of where you were a mere fifteen days ago.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace… though it is no longer like this. Not today.

Today’s tomorrow has not come yet. Today, all I have to do is take the next step on this road. And, the next, making the last one vanish. Today is like the river that runs parallel to the road, the one that cannot be stepped into twice: through a long series of nows, I am finding, ever so slowly, who I am. It’s only been over two weeks on this road of infinite miles, but already I feel I am coming into existence.

Day Twenty-Nine

Welcome Home, friend, I was greeted with a hug, though I’d never been here before. Not in this room. The room I visited yesterday was very similar to this room, but today is a different day. And, I am a new me. Everyone in this room I’ve met on the road; the man who’d greeted me I’d met only a few days ago. The two of us have absolutely nothing in common —he hunts, I read; he watches NASCAR, I listen to NPR; he likes country, and country makes my ears bleed— but we have everything in common, in this room.

I’ve held hands with these people in this new room. I’ve hugged them all, and some, I’ve carried on the road; I have been hugged, and I have been carried by some on the road, when my own load became too great.

But by none have I been judged, and that has made all the difference.

This road is lined now with wildflowers that sway in a perpetual spring breeze. There is verdancy along this road, and the road is now paved. Completely upright, now, my perspective allows for full scope: the road has many forks, with many vanishing points, like the kinds we were taught to draw in high-school art. “The vanishing point is not an end,” Mr. Coleman had voiced as he meandered about the room, our heads bowed over our craft, “but potentially a brand-new beginning.

“For,” Mr. Coleman continued, “life is not about the destination, but the journey. Our personal roads should never end."

Day One Hundred-Thirteen

Today, now, is all I have. Today, there are few coincidences. Polished branches don’t just happen today, for example, and everyone I meet is a butterfly’s wing-flap of change in a new direction. Today, this road is constantly diverging: one day I will be in a calm, yellow wood; another, in a snow drift with poor visibility.

But each day, now, I have options.

Again, as I had in childhood.

Today, I have options, on this road that never ends.