Writing Exercise #117

Mas o Menos by w. clark

I had made an important decision that drizzly December lunch our, a choice that might have been a major turning point, or one that made me realize I couldn’t trust myself, control molecular mutations that were implanted in my DNA, but were fertilized by the irony of life and made me older, smarter, and a riddle unto my own psyche.
I left the office promptly at 11:45 am and it took the usual 3 minutes to get from my desk to the elevator to the front door and down the dozen stairs to the front green and I swiftly broke right up Maroon Hill two blocks west, slushing hurriedly up to the garden gates, and then made haste past the goat petting zoo.
Temporary images whirled past me as I lost more seconds of my hour and tore down to the Landing, the hillside slanted toward sea level and my spine started to burn as my speed increased, the spring humidity filling my lungs with heavy water and my terror elevated to a state of shocking horror for that which broke so many on the same journey to the ends of the earth, the beginnings of the ends of the furiously confused souls who came before me, live amongst me, and will be as unclean with sense of extreme compound awe, as we run past the calm, self-controlled, the composed egos whose filthy poised smirks made our thoughts race faster than our throbbing hearts as we stole away from the sun and found ourselves caught between the past and the future, between the land and the sky, the true and the false, not by choice, but by the means in which we ran though life with desperation and glory. We were born running, we choked on our conscious intensity, and eventually we realize would all die running.
I just wasn’t sure where I was going, but I had to keep on, or let the world stop and close me in its carriage, the cradles of the casual, the place you stop to take a breath is the last exit on the last highway.
Gravity pulled me down the street and I lunged forward as hard as I could, fearing and seemingly unfearful of the fact that my little heart felt determined to blow up in its madness to pump blood into my pulsating limbs, but also my clear head, falling into the ground, falling before I could get anywhere, falling before I reached the new race, the next step to the next step, the next path that always awoke and stirred my soul.
I stumbled on the gravel and drove forth to the liquid at the end of the Landing, the people and children and dogs and boats were the same day after day with faces of security and familiar sanctuary.
I dove into the shallow water and cried the familiar war cry of the storyteller who finally realized to give up on ever ending a tale. Nothing ever ends anyway.