I am not the end.
He is on six different highways, driving at top speed on every but one. He stops only for gas and the purr of his engine spurs him on -- faster, it whispers -- and he can't say no. On the highway that is mine, he is crawling. On my road, he is lost for water, lost for words, lost in wonder, wandering. He is lost, and I am mapless, uncharted, unpaved. I am a barely cleared path through his vaguely known.
He doesn't know where he's headed but he's heading there anyway. Nowhere is everywhere to someone with nothing in mind; soon he will find that I am his greatest anti-catalyst. He tries to find his way out, his way in, his way around, over, beneath, through. He tries to make his way through and the sign says only another 96 miles to the nearest gas station, 115 to the neighboring town, 150 to the place I keep my secrets.
He races on every parallel road, on every concrete lane; out there, he is only matter travelling, He has spent so much time on me, looking for the something significant everyone has told him he must find. They didn't tell him about the geography of me, that there is no geography of me. And the mountains are plains. And the rockslides are rivers. And that he will melt under the heat of his searching and the sun that is water - that is ocean - that is winter - that is absent.
I am made completely of springs.
Ever-changed landscape, I am the New World. He does not have enough years in him to understand where my petals are soft, where the streams are quiet, where no branches break. No amount of whens will lead him to where my forest fires start, where the rivers ravage, where the bulls charge and lock antlers at the onset of spring. He will spend his entire life looking to the stars and they will tell him nothing.
25 miles to the nearest gas station -- he needs to heed the warning signs, the 'get out while you can's -- he is a cartographer and I am a continent. He will spend decades deciding, decoding, and dying, (and dying); and his five selves will curse him for forgetting that there is more to the world than me.
