Original Poetry Fan Fiction ❯ Random Compositions ❯ #2 ( Chapter 2 )

Danielle Tippitt

September 24, 2008

 

 

We met at a fork in the road. I couldn't recall where I'd been going, so it's logical to assume I was the one who appeared out of nowhere; I asked him if it was true. Turns out he was quite as confused as me.

 

It was easy to remember that I was walking somewhere for a very long while, and he said he had been, too. There hadn't been a path. There hadn't been any signs. And very suddenly, things just were. He was there, and I was there, at a fork in a road I hadn't known I was traveling on.

 

It was difficult to distinguish the background from the noise, if you know what I mean. Even if you don't know, I still mean it. I don't know if I was crazy, or if I still am. This probably rambles like insanity: and they say poetry is art. Can there be art without insanity? But that is neither here nor there, and certainly not the point.

 

If I even have a point.

 

We had no idea where we were going, or, for that matter, exactly where we'd been. It was rather akin to being born. He was lost and I was lost, and we had to make a choice based on nothing. It wasn't easy; it wasn't fair. I am never going to stop complaining about that fact.

 

I mean, for all I knew, it was the decision into pure oblivion or the thing deciding the course of my (until recently) purgatorial existence, and I had no basis by which to make it. Seriously.

 

I found myself at a crossroads and there he is, staring at the corner of pavement where two roads met (or where our current road split: I am still unsure of which is accurate) like it could solve all of his problems. I stared into the distance, or what distance existed, wondering if someone would walk down one of those roads and have to choose between where I had been and where they hadn't.

 

That, in turn, made me wonder if I should wait around just in case, and then we could figure out which one had the better chance of leading to anything. And then I wondered if all of the roads led nowhere, which didn't seem likely. There is no point to a road that leads to nothing. And surely it doesn't matter where you're going as long as you end up somewhere, right? I asked him this, also.

 

This man, then, looks up at me, and takes my hand, and smiles sadly. Somehow, the act furthers my belief that such an oxymoron shouldn't exist: Sad smiles, indeed.

 

He said, “You will go left, and I will go right, because one of us is bound to find something, somehow.”

 

He acted like he was so sure: I wish I could be so sure. I asked him: “Why continue walking when I don't expect to find anything?”

 

“You didn't expect to find this place. So you won't really know until you find out. You have to go left, and just keep walking until you find either something or nothing. If you do find something, you can come back and follow me, so that I in turn can follow you. And if you find nothing, you have to keep going until you find something that proves you found nothing. Because otherwise you'll never really know.”

 

He dropped my hand and smiled again, and then he went to the right and I went to the left. I never expect to see him again. If one of us does find something and has to go back to follow the other, they'll be too far ahead and still moving forward. Searching for nothing. Hardly seems logical.