Suppose the path is a circle, like the movement-activated room at the ‘Voice Depository.’
Bear with me.
Suppose there is a place with paths, two paths or a hundred paths- it doesn’t matter. Suppose there are paths and every path is a circle and every circle is the same but bigger or smaller, depending on how it is layered. Look:
Any two people walking the same direction on any one path at the same speed will never meet, though, possibly, they will walk in each other’s shadows. And any two people, constantly in each other’s shadows, are walking on a small path which, considering the nested nature, must be nearer the center. Look:
So, what are the implications of the path and the all-seeing eye? What is the implication of the center, assuming it is not simply a pit but the paths layered so thickly as to be inseparable from each other? Can it be that the stranger and I are so close to the center as to be nearly touching, or that the longer and short paths around us are so close that he has learned to move between them?
Things became strange, reader. At some point, somewhere along the way, things became strange and I wonder if that’s because I’m on a path so short in circumference that normal things have to squeeze in with their shadows just to fit. It would have to be a short path, or else the likelihood of the stranger and I running into each other…
Maybe it isn’t the shortness of the circle, but the dizziness that comes from walking it over and over again. If not dizziness, then attention to detail, an understanding of nuances for having seen the same things over a hundred times. If not nuance- a runaway imagination. An unhealthy man with an unhealthy hobby.
This trip has not been good to me. It has not been healthy. Ambiguous ends do not well justify such taxing means but, now that I have started, I’m not sure how to end with any sort of grace.
It’s hard to believe there isn’t something out there- an answer, a wall, a god. The enormity of the universe, the emptiness of space, the circular nature of time, the relative silence of late evening- they all seem to suggest otherwise. ‘Sorry to disappoint,’ they say, ‘This is it.’
But it’s hard to believe them.
-traveler
