Northport, Alabama

It rained today, a fine misty nothing that clung to my clothes and hair, streaked down car windows but disappeared if you looked at it too closely. It’s always like that in books. The hero walks away, trench coat flapping in the wind that’s always blowing and the rain that’s always falling.

“Make your own f-ing path,” he said to me this week, and the words stung. I tend to walk in his footsteps, the younger, the more timid twin. He cuts swathes through the jungle while I fearfully tread the main road, but the main road is nothing but plodding continuum. There’s no fear here. No dizzy-drunk life force either. You’d think I’d know this by now.

“Equals,” he says, and I struggle with this concept, this invitation to walk beside instead of behind, to conquer the world instead of watch it blow by, so much dust in the wind.

I don’t want to walk ahead. I don’t want to make my path alone. I’m still learning this one, shiny and bright with promise. I’m still dazed by the giddy-high elixir of life. I don’t want to cut a swathe through the dark and the deep. I want to walk beside. I want to walk behind. But I don’t want to walk ahead. I’m not sure I know how.

Music: Diary of Jane by Breaking Benjamin (lyrics)