|mind-gloaming.net|

As I proceed down the hills the landscape changes as the sun crests the hills at my back and warms my jacket. The sun beats down in the cloudless sky and I sweat beneath my jacket, I shrug it off and tie it around my waist. The road begins to warm as the sun hits it, by the time it reaches it’s apex I’ve forsaken propriety and tied my shirt to my head to keep the sun from my eyes and off the back of my neck. The shimmering boil of horizon manifests a building along the road, I can’t tell how far it is but I take comfort in maybe sleeping under a roof and finding water before the sun’s threat of dehydration turns malignant. I trudge on through the day and the sun lowers to blind me as I continue my march down out of the mountains and to the west.

I reach what turns out to be a gas station as the sun is sticking the bottom of the horizon and setting the sky ablaze in red and orange that turns steadily to blue. The prices on the gas pump tells me it hasn’t been used in quite some time, since the prices are stuck up on the sign at just under five dollars a gallon for regular. The ground grows cooler as the sun sets and the heat of the day radiates into the cloudless sky. I break the lock on the rear window of the store behind the gas pumps. The place is small and dusty but it’s got a small one garage for doing oil changes or radiator repairs out here in the desert, a working bathroom, and a store filled with cans of soda, bags of chips and other snacks and a freezer full of melted ice cream. I scrounge around for something to eat that isn’t stale, rotten, or melted. It’s hard to gauge how long ago the power was shut off, the lines still stretch out to the west, apparently this building was the only thing that needed power, I wonder to myself where the clerk is, where the traffic that must have frequented this road have all gone.

Why am I the only one here? There is an eeriness that pervades my isolation, being in this building brings it to the surface. I’m afraid of being confronted with another human being before I know who I am and what I am looking for here on this journey. If I cannot understand my self I cannot hope to understand someone whose thoughts I can never know, who can never know me as deeply as I may some day come to know my self again. Therein lies the most basic assumption on which I rely, that this is not my beginning, that there is indeed a past to find. I walk be hind the counter with some food, water and some blankets, I lay out on the dusty floor, giving my feet a rest and pulling the blanket over myself to shield me from the outside world, to shrink my world to that rough wool blanket and my sore and weary body. The darkness quickly as I finish my food and water for the evening and commit myself to sleep. I am sheltered for a time from anything but myself which may already be too much for me to understand. I shiver my way to sleep and turn on the dusty floor as I hope for a dreamless rest.

There is always an image I cannot shake whenever I awaken; for a time the real world is just shadows under my eyes and this image is at the forefront of my vision as the real world reels beneath. I guess it is more accurate to call it a vision, because it’s not just this static image, it’s noise and feeling and sight. I can feel the sun on my face as I mount those stairs, I hear my footsteps and the yawn and slam of the door as I step onto a concrete slab that serves as a front stoop. This place is known to me, known well. That step and that door are part of what I am searching for; they are part of what I once was and therefore part of what I am now. I rub my eyes and stretch my aching back; I walk to a nearby stream and stoop to take a drink from the cool water. Maybe that house is where I need to go? Maybe it’s where I’m running from? Even as I pose those questions I realize that neither matter because that place exists only in my mind. As the memories fade from the present it seems we polish them up, we squint to make out what is left in our minds, we see only what was good and the past is always better. Any attempt to regain or to relive this past is futile. I can’t focus on what has happened, I must focus on what will and what can occur to really live. I feel now as if I might just be reciting some long dead philosopher’s doctrine, how is that any better than an obsession with my origin?

I push aside the questions as I realize that I am hungry. I haven’t eaten in days and collapsing dead from exhaustion on this desolate road will be good for nothing. I stoop again for get some water, walk to where I had slept on top of my thin black jacket pick it up, put it on and stride again onto that lonesome road. There must be stores along this road somewhere, I can get food there. It occurs to me that I can remember words, what a store is, that there are other people beside myself; but I cannot remember my name, my family, my home, my job, my life before I woke up walking along this path and stopped to use that broken phone.

I’m headed back down this road, back down the hill, back to the highway that weaves down through these hills. When I’m walking and waking I can’t seem to get at much in my mind and on this road, all I have to do is think and question. Why am I walking, where does this urge to move forward come from? Why can’t I be happy in this place or that? I guess it is in the searching and striving that I feel most alive. Not that I know what I live for, All I know is that further down this road I feel there’s something for me. I’m seeking to fill the void, to open my mind again to what was and what could be. I wish this could be stated less obscurely. I feel I am philosophizing simply because all I know at present is life and thought. This road will change me. I stride down the hill and try to see what’s ahead of me. I turn my back on the phone, on everyone I feel I might have used to know. I must seek this out for myself. I’ll deal with the demons as they come and I’ll fight them off. The hill sloped down as my feet smacked the pavement, I’ll have to stop and get some water and a bit of rest. I’ll wait till night to sleep, when night falls and my world shrinks I cannot escape from my own mind and the isolation drives me again toward the precipice of madness. The nights are the worst. On a bright day like today though, I won’t let thoughts of darkness remove the light from this day. I won’t let frustration at the slow progress of things destroy my hope.