Pursuit

Loss, in itself, is not all that big of a deal. You lose a pen and you forget about it as soon as you have a new one. You drop a glass and it is forgotten once the shards are swept away. Even in losing a friend, loss can be brushed aside though with greater force behind the brushing, perhaps. People come and go. Objects. Cars. Like the fall, they change, float whimsically to the sidewalks, are blown away, then grow again only to restart the process. Sad? Perhaps. But in anticipation of the next objective of whimsy in line to fill the void we maintain hope upon the last one’s leaving. We maintain hope in restarted life.

You are walking, introspective. Away from others you march, not towards anything in particular but you wander. A moment away, an attempt at soaking up each shred of what is left of the world you have always known. Tears momentarily fill your eyes as you gaze about. This is the end of your odyssey. The pursuit in which you have invested your body and soul for a time that amounts to most of your life. The pursuit that you have embraced, rebelled against, feared, chided, nearly let go, discovered, and discovered again time after time. It ends today. You have lived a short life thus far. The pursuit has defined it.

You swallow up the emotion. It is useless now. The climax is nigh and you must confront it. And you do, and you find, as you feared may happen, the climax was not the climax at all. For the climax has passed, sometime behind, its timing to be determined later as retrospect allows. There is no pomp. The storybook closes with a back cover, and no butterflies rise from the yellowed pages. Your hands find the top of your head and you thread your fingers through your short hair slowly, and as they comb out falls the musings of a long pursuit. When your hands fall to your hips, the classic pose assumed, you realize that the shadow at your feet is no longer one of a journeyer. It is one of a veteran. You fear that he has been broken. You fear that he has failed. Failed himself. Failed others along the way. Failed the pursuit itself. Only in retrospect will you later know if this is true. For now, you are sick, looking on as the monuments of your path collapse in simple obscurity. Those around saw, but knew not what it was. They saw the crumbling of a life, or way of it at least, and witnessed the beginning of a search for a knew one.

Now you are walking again and again away from others. The emotions come flooding back as the sentimentalist within whom you have always lamented takes his seat in your newly destabilized psyche. Loss of things, of people, those are what you have professed to understand and of which you conquer. Now you face a loss not of those things but of yourself. You shake at the prospect. You blink the tears back. No. This is not the time. The others will not see what you feel. The others will be looking to pay their respects and will misread your sorrow. Keep it within. You reach the end of the long walk, your body numb. From the cold? Or the trauma, unexpected in its weight and thickness? Avoid them, do not let them see your weakness. The first one to speak of your pursuit will almost certainly force your blockade’s falling. Forced free will be your emotions, pressing so strongly against your chest, bred by the knowledge that this is the end, and as to what comes next you do not know.

Loss is strong only here. Journeymen live the journey and little else. When it is long its end is horrific to no one but the man who feels its grip loosen. Freeing, is this release. But you know nothing aside from it and are lost without the strength of its grasp. Voids are filled with objects and people. It is not a void when the whole thing is gone, suddenly ripped from the soul. With what can a journey be replaced? Another one? Added out of respect for the last but bound to end in relative obscurity like it. Destined to leave in its wake another hole. Scared already from the journey before and made larger by the journey with which it was replaced.

Shaken by what is unknown and searching for something you know not what, you limp on. The journeyman, now journeyless, looks to find new life.