the traveler

It happens to me that on occasions I walk through the city streets at night, when no one is watching me, conceiving moments of brief lucidity in which I tear my heart and soul apart with my own naked hands. The sensual movement of the trees and the way the air embraces my body moves my soul out of oblivion.

With arrogance and bitterness, the traveler awaits for the precise moment in which to take the road again, leaving behind everything he knows. Memories are what he controls, the only life he understands. They remain in quiet places, distant faces and little pieces of brown-colored paper. A way to defend his madness and his absence; the fears that surround his days and nights; nightmares that like little demons eat away his skin and suck away his blood.

But the traveler doesn’t know how to give; he simply conceives moments and places without name. Fearing that if he were to give anything at all, he would realize there is no place for him in this reality we have manufactured for him. His is the ability to create the perfect situation and come up with the words that best describe it, without really being there at all in the first place. It’s being able to imagine other people and control their minds. To think, laugh and to cry. Everything he does and says justifies his lack of sense.

But it’s the solitude itself what consumes and eats away his flesh. And so he lives, our traveler, never owning his destiny, always doubting which road to take and avoiding at all cost any kind of encounter that may remind him how lost he is. How imperfect he truly feels.

But have you ever seen the road of a lonely traveler? It is filled with moments and desires, mindless demons that crawl up behind him making little or no sense at all. All the colors of the rainbow paint this road and a soft, melodious chant can be heard all the time.

And he walks on through the road anticipating, looking on ahead and thinking of the way he used to feel. Remembering yet again the distant places and the blurred-out faces of those that crossed his path in the past. But his road is also silence, the silence of his mind and the silence of his actions. He screams and curses time yes, but the poor fool also laughs at infinity and then he cries at his own eternal solitude.

And everything he is and everything he knows. All his dreams, and the fears that hunt him. His world in shadows, and his moments of compassion. All his imperfections, and the years of expectation and solitude. The air he breathes and the moon that watches him when he’s asleep. His clumsiness and the humility he feels. All of his confusion and the innocence he still keeps inside.

All these things and so much more tell the traveler that, after all, his road is also kindness and is hope. The hope that one day he will cease to be the lonely man walking by the side of the road.

Frannk 19.14