CHAPTER SEVEN
They slept at the edge of a grassy glade that night, a couple minutes from the highway, curled up together for warmth, even though it was the dead of summer and neither of them needed any extra heat.
In the morning he woke to find that he was alone. Nell was gone.
He didn’t bother calling her name. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference.
She’d left something for him, though. Scratched into a patch of soil at the edge of the glade. A message:
THEY’RE JUST SUMMER DAYS
And next to the words, a single joint, perfectly rolled. And a silver Zippo.
His eyelids were heavy as he made his way back through the woods. He smoked the joint as he walked. A strange quiet hung about the forest: there were fewer birds chirping, fewer rodents scampering through the brushwood. And nestled deep in his chest: an ache that throbbed with every step he took.
He finished the joint, tossed the roach aside, and thought he heard a voice somewhere nearby. “Nell?” he called.
It was her voice. He was sure of it. And he could almost make out what she was singing. Something like:
“I went wandering one day and I never returned…”
There was no traffic. He waited with his thumb stuck out for several minutes, but no cars passed by. The sun burrowed deeper and deeper into the vault of azure sky above, and after a while he started walking again.
He walked for hours. Walked until the sun went down. He slept under a willow tree, and when he woke the next morning to continued along the highway.
He lost track of time. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he strayed outside of time, and looking up he found to his surprise that he was an old man. The highway stretched on impassively ahead of him. He cast his mind back, many, many years, and pondered the puzzling events of a summer he had to strain to remember.
The old man sniffed the breeze. He could’ve sworn he could smell it faintly, clinging to the air. Summer Haze.
And that was when he came to the crossroads.
It swept through the highway, cleaving clean through it, completely perpendicular: a wide road paved with pure moonlight. And just up ahead, just where the highway and the moon-road intersected, was someone he recognized, or thought he recognized.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” said the other.
They talked for a few minutes, and the old man learned that his old friend was searching for Summer Haze as well. “There’s still some of it left, floating around. You never know where you’ll find it. It’s not even about finding it, really. It’s the people you meet along the way.”
The old man nodded. “The people you meet,” he echoed. He thought of a particular person he would very much have liked to meet again.
They’re just summer days…
But his old friend assured him, then, of a truth that is most important to remember. “Paths converge and diverge, but in the end it doesn’t matter if you take one path or another, this path or that one — it’s all the same in the end. What’s important is that you choose a path, a choose it with certainty, and walk it to its furthest end. Because no matter which road you take, all roads lead to the same place eventually.”
Now, some people will tell you that the old man went with his friend along the road that looked as though it had been paved with pure moonlight — that led, it was rumoured, all the way up to the Seven Gates in the Sky.
Some people will tell you that he bid his friend farewell and good luck and godspeed, and continued along the highway.
It doesn’t matter which. Because in the end, all paths meet up again.
I won’t tell you which path the old man took. The important thing is that as he started on his way, a tune came to his lips. A song he remembered from a long, long time ago.
“She said she was looking for something…
It can set your soul ablaze…”
As he walked, his stride growing longer and more determined with each step, he could’ve sworn that another voice sang along with him — a voice that seeped out of the ground and came dripping out of the sky. A voice stirred up by the rogue, mischievous breeze. You can’t see it or hear it but you can smell it in the air…
“And they called it Summer Haze.”
Both voices chuckled, subdued but unrestrained; and the old man shook from deep within his belly to the tips of his fingers and toes — shook with laughter he could no longer contain. You can smell it in the air…
Then he lapsed into silence, and the world became serene again, lost in thought as it often is when there’s nobody around to disturb it.
THE END
WHICH PATH DID YOU TAKE?
J. Herrera Kamin 