Wanderlust

There's always just one more. One more road to be followed, one more hill to be climbed, one more land to be wanted, one more soul to be had. There's always just one more something else, somewhere else, out there, calling. There's the smell of Summer nights, the sound of trains departing in the distance, the warm breeze, the endless sky and the road, winding out of sight, luring you to pick yourself up and just...walk. Walk and never look back, it whispers softly into your ear, walk to where there is no coming back. And you listen, pale and defeated, because the calling rings in your thoughts like the yearning of a lost child and you have no choice but to follow. It hurts and you wish you could stay - another day or perhaps just another hour - but the season is over and you must tear yourself away; did you not say that loneliness was really but a fair price to pay for freedom?

Of course, unlike the sky, the world eventually turns out not to be quite so endless. After the first cities came more cities and yet more cities after those. After this road, oh no!, not yet another road and roads still as far ahead as you can see and as far back as you can remember. It's time that I go back, you think to yourself, lonely, tired, a drifter with no real purpose, a cuckoo without a nest. You listen to the wind and realise: the voice and the calling have now long been gone. So you finally begin your long return journey, tracing your steps back one by one, through all these places and all this life spent searching. You hope, you pray that they might still remember you when you return. You stand still and gaze silently into the distance, one last time, only to see the sun disappear into the turn of the century.

The way home is even longer than you had remembered. As you walk you see houses closing up their doors, with warmly lit sitting rooms full of smiling people, those who never gave in to the calling of their wanderlust. You remember now every house you ever left behind, every love with which you could have quenched your loneliness, every bright sunrise with which you walked away. You hope you will find them again in your way, but they are all long gone and no one remembers them apart from you. Home, you think, hoping, home they will surely know me still, home one day this journey will finally finish and I will be happy and the circle finally complete. Days turn into weeks, months turn into years; there is nothing and no one around but your blistered feet, the evening darkness dripping slowly from across the universe and the road - warm and quiet, stretching endlessly under the wilting sun. But then, suddenly, you sense it and you recognise it: the smell of Summer, the sound of trains departing in the distance. Your heart explodes with joy and you run, laughing, crying, to touch, to see, to smell, to hear, to taste, to know. Where are they, my beloved, my friends, my family, my childhood dreams, my home? But the night is drawing nearer and everyone looks at you with ther strange and hollow gaze: had you not heard? your people have all died long ago, died of a broken heart.