To new beginnings and the everlasting road…
“The road for ever goes on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.”
- J.R.R.Tolkien
May be her story is a lot more louder than mine, or may be it just has much more drama, more events, more occurrences, just much more… extrinsically… while mine just meanders within my own head.
And along with those random meanderings was a strangely loud knock of heels. It is eerie how soft worn out soles can make that much sound over soft aired mud. Then again, it is easy to juxtapose it to her story… heard a million times, talked about in another million locales and e-locales, rounded off and sanded by those many a pair of hands and heads… and still, it was the loudest story that we heard.
It’s not her, she never voiced it out loud and I never voiced out loud either, except for those very few, it was all very mellow communication. And I still walked the same path, same soft soil, moist at times so it stuck to my ungrooved sole… and still… no mush, no slush, just the knock of heel after heel, like a tap dance on hard wood floor.
I’ve walked this path so many times, the soil has started to smell of me, but it reeks of everyone else as well; Everyone who tread this path. Everyday at the end of this route (also, its start) I realized, I am going in circles and I heard my footsteps no matter how nimble of foot. Just like how her story I heard, in circles and spirals and loud as ever.
And just as my footsteps grew heavier on one side and were preceded by a circular mark of a cane, the path spoke to me… the soil rose and it reeked of me, but told her story…
And then, after a pause, a quaint silence, and the words of the road…
“You’ve searched in me your own self, your story, your stench… And yet, for you I never was quite as rounded, as circular… Yours was a far straighter path moving towards a blind spot… If only you’d have shown faith in me, I would have yelled your story to the world, If only you would have tread me BARE-FEET.”
