7 Streets Over

As it turns out, this is a story best told backwards…



I’ve reached my tranquil end at the intersection of J Street and my own. I’ve reached the peak, so to speak, and decided to take some moonlit pictures and recordings of the morning birds. It’s about 04:30, just before dawn, and my legs are warm. I breathe in large lung-fulls of brisk, dark air. I smell the automated sprinklers, shaded lawns, pines, and oaks. Now, I turn around.

I begin my return home. The quiet, wide, residential streets are empty of all traffic. In fact, I blissfully stroll down the middle with no fear, at all. The only sounds are the early birds, the occasional distant dog bark, and my own footsteps. This isn’t like my home just several blocks down. Certainly, they’re calm and quiet compared to the city we hug, but my streets have a car whooshing by every minute or so, in the dead of night, on either side of the block. One side is a major road with a fork, several lanes, and a mini-mart smack dab in the middle of the prongs. The large main road and complex canyon-like arrangement of houses cut through by streets, walled with trees, riddled with slopes, creates a powerful Döppler Effect. If you hear an increasingly high pitch whooshing sound, you know a car is approaching our street. You learn to translate the echoes into specific directions and vectors. Even if cars don’t come down our street often, it’s good to sense when a car might turn onto it and to get out of the way.

These streets are big, though. While my streets can have a car parked on each side with just enough wiggle room for one lane of traffic, mind you on a two-way street, these more isolated, quieter streets I’m walking down boast having cars parked on both sides with easily enough room to fit two free lanes for traffic. My streets have scars, pot holes, whole chunks of loose asphalt bigger than my foot lying crumbling in the road. These streets are black, smooth, and glisten in the moonlight. The houses here are all small and box-shaped with giant oaks, towering evergreens, and tidy lawns. Our houses are clunky, hodge-podge, and of greatly varied neatness. Some of the houses on my streets are vacant, in disrepair, and even overgrown with knee-high grasses, weeds, and unkempt trees. I remind my astonished self that I only walked 7 streets over. I can begin to hear the turbulent rumble of the city in the distance as I get closer.

Suddenly, I feel as though going from walking in secluded, tranquil woods to a vast and open expanse with a mostly unobstructed view of the sky. In the near distance of about two city blocks, I see two giant, broadleaf trees towering over a wall of smaller trees of varying shapes and sizes. They appeared as though a looming gate to a mystical kingdom.

WHOOSH! A car passes from left to right just beyond the looming tree gate. The car was soaring down the main road. I look up the vast opening to the sky and watch the stars, fading as sunlight gradually intrudes into the atmosphere from over the hills. 05:00 nears and I’ve just a bit further to go to return home. Street lamps illuminate the seemingly endless streets in the north, south, and east. To the west, from whence I return, it is darker and seemingly insulated from the city it skirts the edge of.

Another car whooshes by quite predictably, alone, and I cross the multi-lane north-south arterial. The sky is relatively open, the suburban skyline scraggly and uneven, the yards greatly varied, the constant hum and periodic whooshing of cars in the background: I am home. I walk up the two aggregate steps to my door, open my wallet, slide out my key, and unlock my front door. I walk down my stairs, open my bedroom door, and sit on my bed. It’s good to be back…

Even if it was just 7 streets to and fro, and about 30 minutes.

Overload

I wake up, groggy, and walk out of my bedroom. I walk down a dark hallway into a dark alley. The alley opens up to a cold, rain-drenched cobblestone road with gas lamps in either direction. Each direction is a mirror of the other, parallel wherever I go. I make it to a vast wooden bridge which crosses a moat, and I arrive at a fortress. They ancient stonework nearly crushes me, creating an opening through the fortress wall, so I enter. A vast citadel looms high above a seemingly endless maze, and so I enter the Labyrinth. Roars, hisses, growls, and hellish sounds echo indistinctly from all directions, but I move onward. I go forward, but return where I began. I retrace my steps and find myself somewhere unfamiliar. A supernatural dark cloud forms a wispy ceiling above me. I try to climb the walls, but the climb never ends, so I try to climb back down. Only a few feet down, and I can see the ground again. I chisel through the walls for days, but the walls have infinite depth. As I try to crawl backwards, dreading the rearward journey, but I find myself returned to the path in only a few motions.

Looking forward, I close my eyes, and I begin to slowly walk backwards, dismissing all of my senses.

I open my eyes, and before me is the great citadel. Months spent on this journey, tears well up in my eyes, for I have finally arrived. The doors creak eerily open and I enter. Spiral stairs, millions, go on and on, but I ascend. The slit windows reassure me that I am indeed getting higher in elevation. I finally reach the top, open the door, and find myself on a balcony. I can see my entire journey clearly, from start to finish…

There is no reward, no achievement, no satisfaction. The door slams shut behind me, my heartbeat quickens, and I’m trapped. I pull, I slam, I pound, I kick the door, but nothing happens. I have no tools, no supplies, stranded atop a tower. Days go by, isolated, cold, and hungry. Finally, I lean over the balcony, climb upon the stone wall, and look down.

“Jump…” it whispers. “Jump…” I give in, one foot over, and I fall. A feeling of relief flows through me as I close my eyes and slowly become weightless.

As I wake and open my eyes, I am once again in my bed.