She Decides to Keep On Walking

A considerable number of people are walking around her, but she can't see any of them. All these buildings and structures seem like a large obscure edifice that's captivated all the haunting memories from her past. It is the same path that she takes to get back home every night after work, but it feels so strange. She has passed Uncle Sam's restaurant, is walking by Aunt Rose’s flower shop, and is about to cross Mia's laundry. These are the places that she sees every night on the way back home, but they don't look the same tonight. She's thinking that she has made a wrong turn. She has made many wrong decisions in her life, so technically, she is capable of making a wrong turn. But no, she is on the right dimension. She's exhausted, devastated. She's too tired to walk this road for another hundred steps to reach her home. She doesn't want to go home, not tonight. She wants to go far away, where her past can't chase her, she wants to walk away from it all. She has been through a lot of bad in her life, a lot that can shatter anyone's existence, a lot that can break anyone into a thousand uneven pieces. She can't even decide what her worst memory is. Was it the day when she found out that her father had another son from the woman he fell in love with after his marriage? Was it the day when her boyfriend left her all alone, because he had a mere notion that she was having an affair with another man while he was away? Or the day when her mother died in a plane crash? But, what difference does it make? At the end of the day, all these incidents brought an irrevocable change in her life, like a river suddenly reversing the direction of it’s flow, suddenly running uphill. All these happenings made her entire life seem like a fiction.

For now, all she wants is relief. She wants to go, lay down on the top of the tallest building in New Orleans, and look at the clear summer sky. She wants to lay there and feel that slight breeze that runs down your entire body, making your soul shiver and sense the incredible strength that it possesses. She wants to lay there naked, under an imposing dome of stars, unaware of whatever’s happening on the roads 20 flights down. She has always believed that it is not important in life to be strong but to feel strong. And all she wants now, is to feel free. She wants to believe that this is God's place all around her, and joy is in everything inside it. But, she can't do any of it. She has to get back to her hypocrite father who is laying numb on his death bed, waiting for her to feed him dinner. So, she decides to keep on walking.

She can't walk away from her life, despite all the darkness inside it. She can’t walk away from the truth. So, she decides to keep on walking, holding on to the hope that someday.. She will find the relief.

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Thoughts Deciphered into Words by Raja Abdar-Rahman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.