Inconveniences

The steps I walked so far are a handful; hesitation finds a den in my heart still. This feeling in my gut overshadowing my every thought— the fear of something unknown, forgotten but ever so present.

What am I afraid of? I thought I’d answered this question long before I left the house. I am afraid of death, like a normal human being. This much I accepted and dealt with, even thinking about it now doesn’t do me any harm. I guess I’m also afraid of something else… or maybe it was never “fear” to begin with.

I do not stop; I am here to walk. I do so in even steps; pairs that complete each other. In a scale this small, it seems like I’m one self-sustaining perpetual motion machine, like every first step that distorts a balance calls a second one to retrieve it. Feels like this walking of mine can never be bound by anything. That natural limitation—endurance—seems so far away that it’s… negligible.

I read it in a magazine. Yes, I still read magazines and newspapers. Humans have one of the most energy-efficient walking techniques amongst mammals: more than half of the time we walk is effectively a freefall. No wonder—we were engineered to travel, crafted to walk.

We humans walk to survive. There is no denying survival can be the reason this particular human is walking right now, if you’re fluid enough in defining any of the mentioned terms. But I am literally walking myself to death, and that seems intuitively opposing the idea of “survival.”

I am not far into this walk yet, and yet I feel proud to have made it this far without shedding a tear. Maybe I just managed to avoid thinking about the wrong things… or maybe, I fear, the right things to think about are the ones I’ve avoided so far.

A dozen more steps take me to notice it: a faint inconvenience in my toes. This feeling, slight and insignificant as it is, becomes the first thing to make me look back. I don’t know if I’d prepared for this before or not. Either way, the thought of this pain growing as I walk, taking over my thought and turning my final march into more of a hell than it’s meant to be is heart wrenching.

I remove my shoes, which while erasing that uncomfortable feeling, replaces it with an arguably just as bad embarrassment and disgust. I choose to keep my socks on; their stunning pink will be stained beyond recognition by the time my body is found. The ground is warm from constant exposition to the sun. Luckily, it’s not too hot – otherwise the situation would have been dire –, the warmth just enough to relieve my nerves.

“Very well, with this I can walk.” I actually said that out loud, I do not know why.