Walking Home

Alone in September’s afternoon sun after the first day of kindergarten, it was high adventure at age five. I charted the mile course with survival instinct, not knowing how routine this lonely path would become. God died in October and I held on in wait for his return hoping he was watching me from behind some tree. Adam was my hero then, even though he soon shirked me too, and I was packed with a stick and a bag of plastic armour for Saturday morning practice. Perhaps a thousand days later I was stabbed again. Goddess was still in mourning and sent Adam into exile for sins of disrespect. Bad enough he dallied with Eve, but finding his hot-knives in the closet was the last straw. My grades sank. I didn’t sleep except to sleep in. “Late” described me. It all came down in a shitstorm of childhood science at a third grade soccer game when, after a year of contemplation I said it with great deliberation; that four-letter word of no fixed meaning, the utterance of the self-determined and the defeated. I was not struck down. I would never fear the dead again. Through every season I walked that mile; across the townships rails when in spring the creek flooded; under it’s vast summer shadetrees; and up the orange-gold carpet of maple leaves on a steep, slippery rock cut in rainy autumn. Still, closest to my heart are those lonely winter walks after high school wrestling practice. My hair frozen into a long scraggly helmet, my eyelashes sticking, I looked up at the white flakes on the night sky that became black against the street lamps glow. At sixteen I still suffered that although I would never fear the dead, I could not help but miss him. That mile is mine. I have secured it with a million footfalls. It knows my secrets. And, though generations shall tread its course, it shall always possess me.