Perhaps another day. This one is heavy and dark. It stayed with me into the waking days. today is that day apparently, but the sidewalk, it is strangely light. Oh, how the colors run and paint with the brush of memory.
The path to the The Theater of The Mind is treacherous and strange every step on the Steep Sidewalks is a battle of balance and perspective.
I started out on a normal sidewalk, the border between the Continuos Cul-de-sac and the Steep Sidewalks. Behind me an soft golden yellow light drenched every surface, before me the blue-grey light of a hidden sun with a clear sky treated me. The sidewalk was a light grey, spackled with flecks of light and dark as any aged pathway is wont to gather, badges of the endless feet and elements that traverse them. On either side there are strips of greenery, the left pointing to houses with grey chain link fences and wooden sidings painted in a cool pastel pallet. The cool air traced the grass growing wild by my feet, tugging me onwards.
So I took my steps, knowing that I needed to be there, to get there, to be on my way in the way only a sidewalk could make me feel. If you focus you too much on your walking it becomes harder to walk, this is a maxim of my life upon the Steep Sidewalks.
You must follow the trees, the breeze, the birds and the bees, the thoughts in your head and your silent reprieves from the places you be.
If instead you trace your feet, the treacherous tip of each space, of breaths that come and pace, you are not walking but hiking, the journey now a destination.
So it is with the Steep Sidewalks. The more I focused on the impossibly steep slopes the harder it became to walk them. Indeed, if one were to slice the road and look across the street towards me, they would see the structure not unlike that of epithelial crypts. The tops bulging to create divots shielded from the winds, rains, and wonders.
In these crevasses I felt the greatest pressure, the need to grow and differentiate into something that could climb the terrain. Every thought of such a form of course only increasing my tenure. At the top of the sidewalks heights is when I felt fear, that drop was far and my body was soft, my every thought on how to minimize the risk to my limbs and lives. Every hesitation of such a kind of course only making the drop more impassable.
So I would look to the grass and touch a dew drop, or I would look to the sky and breathe the same air as a cloud. Then I would step, and I would step again, and again. Until I found myself further on my journey, a new flower or a canvas of cumulus greeting my newest vista.
Perhaps in this my journey was simply one of enjoyment. Perhaps here I was meant to practice the act of being and not doing. Perhaps here I was meant to recognize what it was that drove me forwards in life, what it is that kept me breathing. To shed both the fear of not measuring up and the horror at failing. Perhaps it was where I would allow myself to let go.
So it was when I reached the top of the hill, the peak of the Steep Sidewalks, that I saw a vista of nothing. There was no place I needed to be, no “there”, no step I must take, simply where I was and where I am and where I will be.
With that breath, in the featureless expanse of robins egg blue and grey-white clouds bracketed by human artifice, I released the Steep Sidewalks and the way forward grew increasingly flat. Each hill and trench shrinking until it was merely a gentle wave, indistinguishable from those long neglected sidewalks placed quickly for their makers to be on their way.
I do not know how many dreams I spent upon that sidewalk, nor how many places it took me. But there is one thing I do know, where I ended when I last walked the Steep Sidewalks.
After the sidewalk flattened fully I saw it, a gaudy building popping up from nothing, pressed right against the sidewalk, a red carpet tongue ready to lap up any body that were to tread upon it.
This is how I reached The Theater of The Mind.