I like walking in the cold on a stormy winter day just as the clouds darken and the sun turns golden and just before the little gingerbread houses set their lights a twinkling; it gives me an excuse for the constant chill I feel. So I bundle up as if it stops my chattering teeth and step out, my head watching the ground, my feet following the curvature of a path I've walked a million times and I try to stop the shaking. Not only of my body but of my tired mind as the furry veils of my eyes close. I notice the cracks in the road, and the gutters filled with rotting vestiges of life that once hung on these trees that now stand cold and gray against the even grayer sky, their roots begging for warmth just as my toes are. I heard a foot step startling my dazed thought about the cracks and I glanced about wildly to see what it was, a man walking a little brown and white shepherd with no tail, with A lit cigar in his mouth. I return to the road it was now curving just slightly to the left, it was hardly noticeable. I can smell the cigar smoke that man left behind just faintly drifting about in the air. Cigars have a sweeter smoke than cigarettes and thus were no quite as appalling, and the slightest bit *****.  It was in that moment I realized once I leave this moment of my life; I will never truly be alone again. It’s definitely an odd thought, to be concerned I will never be alone again as I abandon my friends and loved ones and yet it rang true in my mind, whether I was on ship, in the barracks, eating, even renting a home away from the base I would have a roommate of some sort whether it be a husband or a comrade.  I may never get to watch the cold winter ash drift down across my feet as the fall out of nightmares consumes the world.
I drifted from the road to a gravel trail. Instead of cracks I watched the moist pebbles drifting below me, their pattern was random, but it seemed to repeat. A little pink one always drifting just a few inches to the left of the others I was observing. On my right the bushes, all bare with yellow branches forming the mangled orbs that most bushes of the sort seem to form, melded into a wide stark white fence with gaps displaying the empty river below. I know the cliff there was a couple feet at most but as I watched the drifting pebbles the burred grass made it seem like a few hundred causing me to stumble and look away from my pebbles. I felt the cold stinging air float in and out of my lungs and listened to the gentle beating of my own heart, it’s tempo near matching that of my feet. A gentle tempo like that is not often found, the unique beat of one’s own heart has a sort of soothing rhythm and mixes with the cold wind rustling the naked branches if trees, a chilling melody was formed.
My trail drifted into concrete which drifted back into the dark chip road. Cars tend to speed up this road, I don’t know why, it leads up a dirt road into a neighborhood, there’s real no reason to go so fast, but it happens all the same. I hear one approaching and flinch as it goes by, absorbed in the cracks in the road I could never know if it was planning to end me or simply passing by. The lights are beginning to be turned on now but they are barely visible, their twinkling was futile against the lingering gray daylight yet they persisted. On this road I constantly had to trust that there were no parked cars and that , when it bent away from me, that I was just crossing a cross road. These roads are so interwoven that each one can form a loop with other, this endless circling adds to the bleakness of the cold evening, and even the gray skies do not change that blistering heat. And as I step under the same apple tree I've stepped under thousands of times, I was glad I wouldn't be alone anymore.