A road that never ends

A road that never ends, paved with parchment, and ink, each step another line in someone else’s story, each stride another crease on a torn sheet.

This road leads to something, it must - I have been on it quite some time now, and I’m parched. I’m tired, and thirsty, I’m spent, exhausted, emotionally drained from reading each line, crying with their stories, stories swallowed up in time, stories forgotten.

A line will always catch my eye. Whether it be sharper grooves on the road, or parchment that entangles my shoe - they always find me, or I find them, does it matter really.

I have been here for long, one wrote. I’m wet, and drenched in someone’s else’s blood. I tied nooses around children that begged me to stop, mothers that pleaded and bargained off all they had. Yet I, I am supposed to feel sad ? I am supposed to give them what they want, give it back when they do not deserve. I am the just man, the honest man. This is not my blood, it is not yours, it is not your child’s, it is Gods, and He is terribly upset.

They all sound like that, some troubled man, treading a new line of life I cannot define, spinning their own wheel on what they please, torturing themselves.

I trip, I always trip - on the jagged parts, the jagged parts that cannot be read, cannot be made out, ink splattered, parchment twisted, and perverse. I fall, I always do, headfirst unto the road - smelling the ink, matching the grooves with the dents in my face, blood curling screeches, endless cries, I can hear it, but I cannot read it, saved by time, forgotten in the thrashed parchment that lies beneath me.

This road is long, I have been here quite some time. I am afraid I do not know the way back. The parchment is narrow, more narrow then I remember it to be, I am having trouble breathing, there is something pressing on both sides of me, and the ink is starting to become slippery, parchment entangles, crawling up my legs, higher, and higher to my neck. Then, it goes black. I am a long ways from home.