The Unreachable

By Peter Bowden

 


He had spent years walking toward it, though he could not say when the walking began. It was not a place you could mark on a map, not a thing you could hold in your hands. It showed itself in quiet ways—a line of light at the edge of evening, the shape of something almost remembered, the feeling that just beyond this hill, or the next, there would be a clearing where everything made sense. He packed lightly for the journey, though over time he learned the heaviest things were the ones he could not set down: old conversations, faces that lingered, the version of himself he thought he might become if he only kept going.

There were days he believed he had nearly reached it. The air would change, soften somehow, and the world would feel arranged just so, as if waiting for him to notice. He would slow his steps then, careful not to disturb it, the way a man moves through a room where someone is sleeping. But it always slipped, not suddenly, not cruelly, just enough that he found himself once again at a distance. Others told him it was foolish, that a man ought to arrive somewhere, build something, name it, and be done. He nodded when they spoke, but he did not stop walking. He had come to understand that arrival was not the same as meaning.

In the end, or what he took to be the end, he stood at a rise and saw the horizon laid out before him, wide and patient. It had not moved closer, not in all his years, and yet he was not where he had been. The man who had first set out would not have recognized this one, quieter now, less certain, but more at ease with the distance. He rested there a while, not defeated, not triumphant, just aware. Then, as the light began to fade, he stepped forward again, not to reach it, but to remain in its company, which, he realized, had been the point all along.

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