Up the Hill
I was walking up the hill. My mind was running through permutations of how it all came to be. I refused to abide by what had come to pass and preferred to drift through iterations of what should have been. It seemed incredible that it ended up the way that it did when everything pointed towards a different and more favorable outcome. “It’s the way of the world,” I sighed regretfully and continued upward.
The scenery did not capture my senses the way that it always had done in the past. I’ve been up this hill regularly for more years than I cared to remember but there always was something here that would grab at me and cry out to have another look and see what I have missed. But this time, I was so locked within the confines of my mind that nothing managed to infringe upon me. I just continued walking up the hill, oblivious to all else aside from my thoughts.
I just did not understand it. Things should not have worked out the way that they did. I had done nothing different. The others that were involved had behaved just as I suspected. Nothing intervened to toss my world amok. The laws of nature were abided. The factor of the unforeseen was kept to a minimum. Yet the unforeseen happened. Even in retrospect it still seemed highly unlikely that it should have. But happen it did and my world would never be the same and I just refused to allow myself to accept it.
The slope felt more taxing than it ever did before. For some reason my legs felt wearier than they should have given the amount of distance that I had covered. Normally I would not be considering taking a quick breather to allow my circulation to reestablish itself in my lower extremities. But today the veins and arteries were not working like they did when I was a child so many decades before this. I had no recourse but to pause in my tracks and stay still for a minute or so. As I recovered from my fatigue, my eyes refused to gather in my surroundings. These had been seen many times before. After my rest I continued.
My body was spry but my mind felt ancient. It had just seen too many things and was no longer interested in any surprises. Yet it was sick and tired of the same day in day out drudgery. If anything, it just did not want to be a mind anymore. It wanted to step out of its confines and cease to perceive, retrieve, analyze and emote. Its constituent parts desired nothing more than to disintegrate and allow its core elements to unite with ambient atoms and create wholly new molecules that had nothing to do with me and any of the memory baggage that I carried.
But I continued on. And the hill was still there. And everything that bothered me still bothered me. I thought of those luckier than me. I thought of those less fortunate. They positioned me in my universe and they ensured that I would not go too far astray from my place. Things would get better for the lucky and things would sour for those already wretched. Nothing really changes. Everything stays relative. Everything stays the same.
What had happened happened. Time could not be knocked from its track and be forced to start over. Yet, what happened need not be so important, I told myself. I can live with the fact that it had occurred but I need not impugn upon it anything more and make it the focal point from where all else swings. I could go on and I could continue.
And then I felt like I was no longer going up that hill yet I still was upon its side. My path remained the same and my choices had not altered. Somehow though there was a new nuance upon the scenery that I may have witnessed a hundred times before. But now it possessed a property that had not been there earlier. I took note and silently cried out loud that it was the way of the world and that this world was mine. I was its lord. I was its shepherd. Even though I could not marshal its events I still held final decision upon its effects. It could touch me but only in the way that I desired. I had blended with the hill and I became stone.
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