Daniel Brachhold

The Journey


Fifty feet above the ground of a plain field a lonely
hawk draws his circles, looking out for his next meal, but the only thing he
sees is a man walking….
The man walks along an empty, long path in the middle
of nowhere, looking to his left, looking to his right, and starts thinking
about the reason why he started his journey…
He can´t even remember…
The more he thinks about it, the more he comes to the
conclusion that he had no real reason for doing that, he just felt like he had
to leave.
Many days ago, he suddenly decided to leave the place
that was his shelter for such a long time, and made upon his way without having
a certain aim…
“I must be completely insane” was the last thought in
his head before he left…  
Four days ago, he left behind the last evidence of
civilization leaving the main road and entering a small path that led straight
into the “unknown wilderness”, the open nature.
Now he was walking there, all alone, with the sun
burning down on his head, making him feel kind of dizzy and while looking up to
the sun, that was shining down on him without any mercy, he saw a hawk passing
high upon him. He stopped for a second and started smiling…
”How beautiful it must be, being able to move easily
like this, straight through the air, riding on the wind like a speedboat on
open water”.
He focused on his way again, pulled out a bottle of
water out of his big army backpack, the only thing he took with him from the
place he used to call “home”, took a big sip and continued his way.
Walking on for hours, at least it felt like hours to
him, he recognized how nice it was being in that state of timelessness that
establishes after some time having no watch around the wrist, having no
pressure or anxiety of missing an important date or getting late to work, just
being on his own, alone with nature.”
“I guess not many people even know this kind of
freedom anymore, that’s a thing that completely got lost these days” he said to
hisself, getting more and more confident that this was the best, probably the
only right decision he made in his whole life.
“I´m feeling kind of tired, I better look for a good
place to sleep soon”  he mumbled to
hisself while watching the sun slowly disappear behind the horizon. Sunsrise
and sunset had been the only reference left to the one thing that ruled his
whole entire life until he left…
 ----“Time”----.
His alarm bell used to ring the first time at 8am, he
got up at 8:30, then he went to the bathroom to fresh up, left the house at
nine, so that he could reach work just in time because of traffic, started work
at ten. Lunchtime from 12:00 to 12:30, work again, a short coffee break from
16:00 to 16:15, leisure time at seven pm. Driving home from work, stuck in
traffic, getting home at eight. Having Dinner at nine, go to bed after watching
his favourite TV show at eleven, from Monday til Friday…
“How ridiculous…”
“We all live like ants in an anthill, drilled from
childhood on to be perfectly organized with everybody accomplishing his due to
the whole thing and if you don´t fulfill your part you become an outcast,
living in this system, but not being part of it. Actually we are nothing more
than megalomaniac animals. The awareness of this fact makes you think about the
sense of it all. If you take your time, look up to the sky and watch the stars
you gonna realize what a tiny piece we all are in this huge universe, so how
can mankind be so overbearing?”
But all that seemed to be so far away right about now,
that it already had started to be unreal, now that he had fled out of this
perfectly organized chaos he used to be part of his whole life until now… 
Suddenly he was torn out of his thoughts by the
screaming sound of a rabbit or a mousse getting caught by a hawk and fighting
his last struggle…. until it got quiet again. “I wonder if an animal wastes a
single thought in his quite short life about dying.”
Just in this moment his eyes spotted the silhouette of
something in a distance of about 200 yards right in front of him. Walking near,
he recognized that it was an old Indian tent with a small fireplace besides it,
glowing slightly through the incoming darkness. As he almost reached the place,
he saw an old Indian man with long grey hair sitting at the fireplace, smoke
climbing up out of the wooden pipe in his mouth. The old man looked up at him
with his deep black eyes that were sparkling in almost a frightening way
because of the fire burning in front of him. His whole appearance aroused the
impression that he was a wise old man that had probably been a very long time
on his own thinking a lot, but still he had an admirable and peaceful charisma…

Instead of being surprised about the unexpected guest,
the old man smiled and whispered with a faint, smoky voice: “Sit down my
friend, you had a long journey, but you arrived just in time…”
  

All rights belong to its author. It was published on e-Stories.org by demand of Daniel Brachhold.
Published on e-Stories.org on 08/23/2011.

 
 

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