I Followed Him Home
I continued following him. Nothing out of the ordinary happened for around 15 minutes when he turned off into a thin path.
My eyes began looking around at the path I had just started walking on, it was the first time I had been in that part of town; which wasn’t that weird as I only ever went to the town to go to school which was a 4 minute walk from the station. My gaze gravitated downwards. I looked at the broken path I was walking on. I noticed the pavement was littered with cracks and fractures which looked like wounds and scars of the earth. As soon I noticed these, I began attempting to avoid all of them. I hummed the tune of the common childhood poem, “step on a crack, you break your mothers back, step on a line you break your mother’s spine." I hopped and jumped over the lines engraved in payment, occasionally tripping over and stepping on a crack where I’d pretend I didn’t. That quickly became boring and I began walking normally again. It took around 30 seconds for my legs to regain rhythm and walk normally. It was then after my legs had regained their function, I looked at the sky. Due to it being October, the sun was nearly set. I used to devote October photographing the falling sun in all its hues. I swore I’d never see enough sunsets then. Turns out I had seen so many crimson skies under multi-colored leaves that I didn’t even stop to look. My brief gaze at the sky before my eyes began looking forwards once again made me feel sad, but not too sad because wasn’t that how the world worked? Beautiful things become ordinary—everything slowly becomes boring. Something that I noticed that didn’t go away though was sometimes the rising sun scared me. It was another irrational fear I had. I thought the sun was so big, and yet when it rose it didn’t make a sound—not even a whisper. It was nice how it lit up the entire world but it was scary that there was absolutely nothing I or anyone could do to stop it. It confused me why more people weren’t scared of the sun, when you think about it it was truly terrifying. If the sun ever decided to go away, so would the world.