In the farthest corner, where the sun would rise relentlessly on the spot where his bed used to be, lay a limp pile of linens-blankets and sheets that bore the fade of being little cared for. He hated their smell, the dusty, milky scent that followed him everywhere he went, that couldn't be burned away. He left them there, crumpled in a heap of defeat. They has served their purpose in an old new beginning.
He emerged into the cool of the night, sticky with anticipation and hard-earned fatigue. He looked to the eastern sky, hazy with fluorescent valiantly fighting the darkness. He knew that beyond them lay the crispness he was drawn to, the unfettered freshness of the less inhabited, but he could not travel long that way before he would run out of gas and time. The thought of crickets chirping louder than wheels and gravel and warnings was in his imagination alone, but he knew better than to give into childish petulance over the constraints of modern independence. The road lay out ahead of him, but he had ties that bound.
He wandered north and pulled his vessel towards a hill that seemed to offer a semblance of solitude, a welcome difference from the taverns and parking lots that were a part of his initial plan, where he could saddle up and lose himself in jukebox blues and conversation and the antics of the people just like him. The hill was small and steep and promised no distractions, but as he pulled his whiskey bottle into his coat and climbed, he knew that this was not the time for barroom baptisms, but for the sanctity of the personal and private.
His body leaned forward as he climbed the grassless slope until he found a resting place beneath the far-reaching branches of a tree. He sat on the earth and dug his heels into the land, bending his knees up to his chest like a child. His view was none to marvel at-a sparse knoll of grass at the foot of the hill bled out into a curb, and a street lined with painted lines and fading signs stretched out in either direction. The dirt was dry and mushroomed around him like tiny volcanoes every time he settled or shifted, wafting up to his nose and reminding him of times long ago when as a boy he could never have imagined what it would be like to be him now. He could not help but dig his fingers into the dirt now, letting it creep beneath his fingernails, feeling it gather in his grasp, unearthing the small rocks within each clump and then releasing and patting it all back down deliberately, uniformly, as if he were playing with snow.
He opened his ears as he opened his whiskey bottle and listened for the life around him. There was buzzing, always buzzing, but where was the life? The sounds were just too constant-street traffic approached, zoomed, by, receded, and repeated. The whirring of electricity passed all around him, marquee to traffic signal to headlight, ever utilized, ever taken for granted. The distant but consistent wail of sirens, shouts, accosting, surrender, all cycled, one starting where the other would end. Never was a dwelling more energized, but what inhabited this city but machines?
He thought of the bedsheets, and the chairs, and the forsaken room, and he wondered what his next set of walls would look like in the beginning and in the end. Would they go from bright and welcoming to stark and impersonal? Would their freshness be tainted by familiarity before long, and would he come to ache for the places he had abandoned after making them his own?
The sky behind him seemed monstrously infinite, but surely for every man, a sky too often uncharted can seem a wall. For some the vast horizon would never be enough, and suddenly he was glad that he had more to venture and absorb. He knew that he would stay here with the machines, if only for a little while longer. He would find a place to dwell that gave him something he was lacking, though it would not be everything he wanted. The awareness of this gave him a strange comfort, and he laid back onto the hill, thinking to himself that even the hum of the concrete jungle had a natural rhythm that could not be denied. The scent of the musty earth freed him from a little of his past, and though his desire was to change and re-create, he told himself that after all, skin must be shed a layer at a time.
