365 Days (Part 2) | ✓

299. Concrete

299. Concrete: Write about walking down a sidewalk and what you see and experience.

The Sidewalk Goes On

Every child has at one point in their life considered running away. Perhaps it was to fight dragons and go on adventures. Perhaps it was for earthier reasons. Yet few do.

Life is hard. It will always be hard and that's a daunting prospect. You cannot ignore that the desire to run away is still prevalent: that earnest and desperate urge to start over. I am a child still. We are all children. So when I walk outside, I imagine I run down it and I don’t look back. I run, and I run, and I run, because somewhere it stops. Because it must eventually stop. There must be a place in some tiny, unheard of town where the construction workers stop pouring the cement and say that this is where they cease; the local government has decided to go spend the money elsewhere.

But in my mind that is a far land, a distant land. All I can see is the sidewalk that goes on, running parallel to a street, until they curve and a house blockes both from view. I know it goes on after that, and it continues to meet its tail or its middle in some clever design of some clever man who designs the layout of neighborhoods. I know because I have walked on it. Now I wish to walk it alone.

It is the brief moments like these that hit me so painfully. It gives me a glimpse of a life I am too scared or too wise or too smart to live. A life that people write books about. I wonder at continuing to run. I see in my mind ignoring life, reality, duty. I see myself running straight on, or even walking. It doesn't matter, as long as I go on.

Of course I don't. I don't. The attempt is not worth the failure.

So I resume my life, but there's a secret smile, an imagining, a hopeless longing in me, that thinks about how I would run -- oh, how I would run -- on the sidewalk that goes on.

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Tomorrow is Day 300!