The Long Walk Home

He was grateful he wasn’t dead. He found himself lying on the wet grass on the side of a backroad. He blinked, and then again, opened his eyes and saw the million stars that shone above him. The moon has its full face on sight. A ring around the moon, he said to himself, a sure sign of an impending evil. He tried to recall the events the night before or even what happened that day. He could not remember. It doesn’t matter. His former self, whoever he was, is not important anymore. He stood up and brushed a few grass blades and mud off his faded denim.He must have walked more than a mile already. In this pitch black and desolate road, it is impossible to keep time and distance. Only the light of the moon and the peculiar ring around it guides him on his seemingly aimless journey. A few more miles and he heard unusual crackling on the muddied ground. He looked around and saw a tiny figure a few meters back. “I’ll walk with you if you lighten your pace a bit,” she said. He waited. She was waif thin, hollow cheek, severely coughing and sweating profusely.

“Are you all right?” He asked.

“Quo vadis?” was her answer. He was bewildered. “I ask, where are you going?” She coughed.

The question resounded in his mind. It was so simple, yet he has no answer. Quo vadis? But questions such as this could lead to many more inquisitions. Where have you been? Who are you?

“I don’t know.” To where he’s heading, he does not know.

“Come on! Everybody has somewhere to go, or someone to look forward, or someone waiting for them at the end of this road.” More coughing.

“I suppose…I’m going home. And you? Quo vadis?”, he asked her in return.

“Somewhere where there is hope.”

“Hope is hard to come by these days.”

“And so is love,” she added.

“I am not looking for love.” He sounded indignant.

“People like us are different. We are eternal travelers of this world. We constantly question who we are and why are we here and to what purpose do we serve. Seekers of truth. We search for answers but at the same time, we search for hope, for love and for salvation. The inquiries on existence, life and salvation are all that we carry on our imaginary baggage. For us, to live is to be in constant search for answers. Answers to questions that we barely understand.”

He was silent for a while. The solemnity of the time and the place and the monotony of walking provided a perfect setting for him to immerse in such profoundness. The loud coughing of his companion, however, roused him to reality. “When I found myself, I was grateful that I am alive,” he began to speak, “Now I don’t know whether I should feel thankful or sad. There is nothing more in this world that I wish for but to be ordinary. To be like the girl who goes to church because her parents told her it was the right thing to do. Or someone who wakes up in the morning with the smell of breakfast and is content for merely being with his family. Or better yet, have a happy home, go to school, go home, eat, sleep and never to answer to such questions as “Who am I?” or “Quo vadis? or “Is there a God?”. To live by merely existing. But alas, my nature, my path, or maybe because I was simply born to question or to seek, makes it impossible for me to be one of them. And this makes me sad.” He was telling her more than he wanted, but he has found a kindred soul.

To all this, she said, “To live, my dear, is different for everyone. Some live to serve and glorify a Supreme Being. Others to satisfy themselves — their vanities and appetites. For the simple, like you said, to live is merely to exist. For the inquisitor, like you or me, to live is to travel the backroads of life, to explore the detours and discover alternate routes.”

“By the way,” she added with a glint in the eye and a hidden smile. “How can you be sure that you are alive?”

“I know I am alive. I am walking beside you, am I not? Not unless you are dead, then I must be dead too.”

“I have died so many times before. I died when my 5th grade teacher told the entire class I wasn’t smart enough. I died when my mother left my father for another man. I died with my first heartbreak. I died when a friend drowned. I die a little everytime I stumble in one of these backroads. I die, too, during the times I stopped probing, seeking and hoping. Now … tell me you are not dead.”

He was appalled by her words. Yet after she had spoken these, she coughed, severely and then more severely. “Are you all right?” She answered him with more coughs and bloodstained sputum. She lurched forward and he caught her in his arms. From a distance he heard a rumbling sound of a tired engine and a flash of light. A farmer’s decrepit pick-up suddenly appeared from a good distance and halted near them. The farmer saw her sick appearance — slight fever, night sweats, fatigue and cough with blood — he figured it must be tuberculosis. He has a room to spare a few miles back on the road, the farmer told them, and they are most welcome to stay for the night.

“I do not know her,” he said. “But she is very sick and it will be good for her to have a little rest tonight. I, however, still have a long journey ahead of me.”

She whispered faintly as they lifted her in the truck, “I’ll wait for you on the forked road.” And the pick-up truck vanished along the anonymous, bumpy path.

All the remaining night and the next morning, he walked on the solitary road, stopping only to eat from the fruits of some trees or wild bushes. A few distances away from the forked road, a figure slipped from among the trees to meet him. “I’ll walk with you if you lighten your pace a bit,” said a voice.

“But I left you 25 miles down the road with tuberculosis!”, he was aghast.

“I died in a small room in a farmer’s house last night,” she said.