Each old thing in its new place must prove its worth yet again. Dust is disturbed, having made itself at home among what former tenants have found wanting. A friend brings a gift to brighten my room then leaves a cruel word to move in with me. Good and bad don’t always line up opposite. Nearing the end of an earlier journey, I’d stopped at a roadside motel whose name ameliorated the experience of staying there not at all. Around it rose the dark forest of the Shield country, endless differentiation appearing undifferentiated though one had the sense of something slowly, unrelentingly, being taken apart within. Ahead lay great happiness, great sorrow, and it seems to me now a decision was to be made between them then, though the conditions for such a choice did not exist. The past is so poorly constructed, so unsuited to the living that must be done, we might wish for the forest to grow up around it — but knowledge can’t replace the facts of its acquisition. They continue to perform in the events they set in motion whether we remember them or not. I was hungry, it was very late. Across the four lanes northbound, southbound, divided in my memory by a waist-high steel girder, a gas station convenience store’s neon still awake. Seldom a break in the traffic, footbridge miles away. To get to the other side quickly meant taking your life in your hands.
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