He had finally made it to that one point in his life that he had always wanted to make it to. For the whole of his adult lifetime he had wanted to be here, on the freeway in his vehicle, with nothing left behind him and the empty horizon ahead. Finally he was free of all his debts and emotional commitments. Through twenty-five years of working to live, constant self-deception in telling himself his life was going in a good direction, his mind had been focused on coming to his point. At fifty years old he was childless, friendless, single. That fact was a constant reminder of his attitude towards life, which had him focused on life outside of his own. About starting anew, putting all of his failures and regrets behind him, and all of his depressing memories. Now he had made it. His entire passively-led life was behind him. It cannot be described well enough, his disdain for the life he was living for nearly thirty years. Working was his enemy, he was lazy and always trying to make the easy dollar, he never took a chance, or squandered the few that he had. He felt like a slave. Mainly to himself. Also to his past, because he never stopped dwelling on it. He only looked forward to the future, to this seminal goal in his life to be alone living on the road. He felt that was what he deserved, where he belonged. For decades of focusing on getting to this point he would stop himself from doing anything that would hold him back from achieving this goal, including turning away any opportunity that would have him go down a different path. This choice of lifestyle had him get to the point he is at now. Driving down the highway, his life behind him, an empty horizon ahead. Emptiness. Infinite emptiness. Behind him, beyond him. If there wasn’t a brick wall in the road ahead this realization hit him like one. All at once. The layers of denial, and perception, which promoted his destructive way of living life for decades, these layers all came crashing down. In an instant of a single thought. He pulled to the side of the road and broke down. Suddenly he wanted to turn around. To go back to the points in his life where he chose to turn people away and accept them into his life. He wanted to go back to the times of wonderful opportunities to actively engage in life and get out and try something new were pushed away. And he wanted to accept them. All his life he was scared, too scared to really live, but it was too late now. He only had emptiness ahead of him. And then he was glad! He made it up in his mind that he still had his life ahead of him. New opportunities, new people to meet, new everything. He told himself that he could still change. Just like he had his whole life prior. And he drove off into the emptiness.

He found himself in the southwest. A barren landscape reflective of his soul. He had driven for hundreds of miles, through long cold nights with the window down and the desert air in his face. He stopped in the middle of a long, flat stretch of freeway. After pulling off-road and parking, he got out of his RV and stood there by his open door. Wisps of dust blowing across his feet, bare save for the flip flops. Two steps were taken back and and he was out of them. The feeling of the desert beneath his feet was wonderful. He looked up and saw the universe above him. The sky was clear of any polluting city light. He had never seen the stars so bright, He had never felt so close to everything all at once. In this moment a floodgate had opened. To his mind came every bad memory of his youth, every day he struggled to get through, every bit of remorse and regret, everything negative. It was everything he had suppressed and bottled up for decades. There was a welling of tears in the corners of his eyes. He dropped to his knees and bent over, his forehead touching the earth. A freeway passerby would assume it to be prayer time for this weary traveler, this journeyman, this pilgrim on his pilgrimage. As the first tears fell from his face they hit the sand and formed twin puddles, small dusty pools. He clenched his fists, furrowed his brow. ‘Why the anger? one would ask. ‘Why all the pain?’. He finally had all the time in the world to collect his thoughts, to sift through the good and the bad, through all of the moments in his life that would subtly push him to be the person he was today. Like Noah he would collect everything good and let drown all the bad. Let die every bit of him that clung onto the pains of his past. For too long he was stubborn and would not let go of this pain. He needed it to learn from. But to learn what? He always told himself not to rely on others “for they would only let you down” he’d say. He inflicted upon himself years of isolation because he could not let go of that perception of people.

He looked up at the night sky. He felt alone, but it wasn’t a particularly discomforting feeling. He had gotten used to it after roughly thirty years. In the stars he saw his youth flash before him., and all the silly mistakes he had made. A cold wind flushed over his head and he closed his eyes to keep out the billowing dust. Nothing happened. No epiphanies. No great unraveling of the meaning of everything. His entire time on Earth was equivalent to the time it takes a flu bug to get through his system, in the grand scope of things. Of what importance was he? The sun will rise in the morning and set at dusk, and will rise again. The ebb and flow of time and space will never end nor will ever be fully understood. He just has to simply exist, to float on like he were in an endless tide. He has to break away from all emotion, all sorrow and regret, because all that weight will only cause him to drown when he only wants to breathe, to live, to be.

After standing he’d kick away the sand at his toes, destroying those little puddles of sorrow before him. He stepped back once and slid into his flip flops. He decided to stop looking at the skies because anything that might ever matter to him again existed only ahead of him. He focused on the everlasting journey. After all, the stars will always be looking down on him, even when the sun’s light gets in their way. He planned on being sixty miles down the interstate before the sunrise, which was fast approaching as he saw on the horizon a magic lavender light creeping over the distant mesas.

Or maybe he never went down that path. Maybe one day he decided not to become what he saw himself becoming, what then would he have done? Something came into his mind at an early adult age that told him he needed to make some kind of brash decision. Something told him he needed to run. It wasn’t a want but a need, and it didn’t matter what he ran from or why he felt he needed to run. It is just that the urge was there. He felt compelled. Almost to a breaking point as he would continuously shoot down this idea. Cognitive dissonance, perhaps. It was as if one part of his mind, the part molded by his parents and teachers to conform to society, told him that making a fast decision to run was the wrong decision, that running at all was wrong. The other part of his mind, this newly awakened mind, told him that he would be defined as an individual based on whether he would run or not. He felt like if he didn’t he would lose some vast cosmic game. Fail some sort of generational hand-me-down destiny to get into the unknown and know it. Which may have been the case. Ancestral inquiries show that there were people running from religious persecution and running towards an endless horizon only to discover the great discovery, all before making their contributions to the succession of their bloodlines, of which he was an end result. So say that he denied the seemingly and increasingly inevitable future he was ahead of him. What then? A month-or-two’s worth of hitching, bus riding, and couch surfing before he would end up in some foreign location, out of his element and helpless, probably scared in some fashion. At what point will this need to run, to escape the inescapable, be satisfied? Because nothing is good enough for him. He wants everything but gets nothing. Perhaps he finds work, takes a liking to the commonly-seen people around him. Maybe wherever he ends up is where he always wanted to go but never knew. He doesn’t fully understand the ways of the world outside of Western cultural and media influences. He doesn’t understand the way things are at their rawest and most basic of forms. Sheltered upbringing begets sheltered mind. Was it an understanding that as he came into adulthood the world was not as he thought it was, and in that understanding was there born the notion that to realize the true way of life ought to be?

If he could erase all misconceptions from his mind. If he could be a blank state in a flyover state and start from the ground up, building his own ideas and perceptions of the ways of the world based from true, real experiences. Perhaps that is the idea in itself, to forget everything he was ever taught that he once believed to be true yet cannot let go of, and start believing in something real. Not any certain god or religious dogma ingrained into his psyche since birth. To him those weren’t real, tangible things. He wants something real in his life. He only wants to live and not to merely exist. He understands that belief is a very powerful thing in life, but to find something worth believing in out there in the wild, that is his quest. Or it was what he wanted it to be would he have changed the trajectory he saw his life heading in.

He sees that work is a means to an end but is so selfish in the pursuit of this quest for belief and self-realization that he refuses to take anything else in his life seriously. Yet outside pressures will rear their nasty heads. People will want him to give up this self-imposed destiny, this whimsical fantasy future he keeps planning for himself in his mind. Eventually he will grow weary in leading this cop-out lifestyle, caving in to the interests of other, more productive members of society. Eventually he will graduate, get a thankless job and live out the rest of his youth, and beyond, in scrutiny. He knows that one can only have a pipe dream like his for so long, until unwilling acceptance of the fact that the possibility to get out and live this free life has passed will begin to eat away at his soul. Then comes discontent, anger, what else. He will get older, continue to work and live alone, until he comes to a boiling point of self-resentment. What then? Suppose he gets past this and he manages to quit working, take his savings, and finally get out and run. And live. What will it all be for? The idea is to free himself while he is young so that he may apply any lessons learned to the rest of his life. Yet if he is too old for this, why bother? Everything will have been in vain, his life lived but not fully lived, and then he will die.