The Ends of the Road

I wonder, sometimes, where it all goes to. Nights like this that shine with light some shade of graphite; days like this last that ring out in colors fit for works of second-grade painters. Where do they end up, if only set back into the nooks of our however-many pounds of grey matter? Will today be lost once my blood tires of the long trip and decides to rest? Perhaps they live on, these days which, all tallied, give us the sum of our lives. Perhaps this moment--my girlfriend’s face in the mirror at the end of a long hallway, scrubbing and sopping and rinsing away the makeup and daylight from her face while smells of autumn, bottled and retailed, waft through the house from somewhere—perhaps this will last.

The hope we have is like this, I suppose. The feeling that this moment has been caught in the nets somewhere, and that somehow those nets are larger than the neurological ones explained to me earlier this year by the brain scientist who sat next to me on a plane. It is a question of significance--of worth, of reality--a question of endings.

At intersections, I take notice of one small sign, sometimes at the exclusion of other more important ones. A small white sign which, in black letters, reads “END.” It is often followed by a series of numbers or a type of tree, or by a name—the name of a person—signaling that this or that person’s road has ended, it has all passed, and now another must be taken. There is a sense of completion when I reach these signs, a sense of purposefulness and meaning and definition. As I turn off those roads, the ones with marked ends, I feel a tinge of listlessness, the feeling of a seafaring man too tired to get home, or perhaps just lacking the motivation. But just as that droplet of whatever kind of chemical makes its way through my nervous system, another follows: one of curiosity, one that makes me lean to see around the traffic, one that makes me wonder, “if I could just see over this next hill…this next turn…this next night…”