Crunch… Telling thuds... Boots biting heavily into gravel.
Crunch…
Crunch… The sound refuses to cease. My engineer boots make their noisy way forward, and though I have nothing but contemplation to give me company, something compels me on. Not that my path is particularly picturesque or my goal is incredibly alluring, nothing like that. The path is quite commonplace, and its end is shrouded in the mysterious murkiness of the distant horizon. The time is dusk, a beginning or an end, as you like. I look up, my walk uninterrupted, and I see a sky bleeding away the last of its light. It’s getting darker every moment, the sun on the verge of another escape. But I don’t stop, not that I revel in the darkness. Not that I don’t fear it. Just that I love walking.
Crunch… This sound has a different inflection to it…
I see the boulevard has acquired quite an autumn crop of dead leaves, and I can’t help crushing them to direr oblivion. Such is their fate—no comfort, not even in death. I walk on, the dying sun my guardian angel, its diffused light my passing guide. My face is earthwards now, my hands reside in my pockets, and my eyes close. My mind wanders in abandon, wondering about all, and nothing.
My imagination threatens to bolt away like an untethered hog. It takes some effort of will to keep it within the ambits of sanity. I wish to concentrate on my life, but all I see is darkness. Is that everything? I wonder. There is no blazing sun, for night is the time as far my mind can decipher. There is no smiling moon, for it has no place in this sinister firmament. The air is rife with a smell of dereliction, a desolate aroma that underlies every jot and iota. It is that same common sight I see everyday, and I am sick and tired of it. I open my eyes, and close the vision.
And as ever I find myself standing. As ever there is that feeling of stupor in my head, and a bitterness beyond bile in my guts.
I look up again. The sky here has turned dark too. And as if to mock me in consummation, the moon has failed to rise. The moon has given me company, and comfort, on all such evening promenades before. But alas it seems even he has had too much of me. The night sky seems barren and dismal without my solitary ally…too full of blackness, too short on light… until I notice the stars.
They are everywhere, sprinkled all across the darkness in ample measure. It is perhaps, almost surely in fact, the moon’s absence that brings me to notice his diminutive cousins. Whatever the cause may be, these stars suddenly have me in their hold, whole and compliant. It is weird and wonderful indeed that these orbs of scorching gas can look so innocent and meek, dwarfed by a dwarf that has no effulgence of its own. More wonderful is what they are doing to me on this walk of fate… in them I see something I have always hoped to see… hope itself. My eyes light up, and close of their own accord, and my legs begin taking me forward again, as if on cue. The walk is on once more, and the vision is back.
I see the same moonless sky, breathe in the same dejected air, but I don’t despair any more. For this time life has taught me a lesson in desire. I have learnt to search for stars, small in their appearance, but mighty in their verity. The eyes of my soul search the sky for these teeny bits of infinite radiance…
And lo! Rejoice! The stars are found… or are they? No, it seems, for there are these tiny dots of mirth all across my vision, but they move, and they fly… not stars, surely… my mind does a double take, then bounces back—fireflies!
I reach out for one, miss, then catch another that seemed out of reach. The effect is nearly instantaneous. A power astonishing in its vitality races through me, coursing through my veins, filling me with an ethereal joy that glows… within and without. I open my eyes again, but the vision stays this time, and I see I haven’t stopped.
Something tells me I never will.
