Like everyone else,
I can only step through the gate
my mother and father took to enter this world.
I must exist in the space their bodies made.  

Their walk set my path and determined my streets.
I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories
I lived and never lived.

Where the dust remembers their steps,
I wander off until the road narrows,
and no clear way forward forces me to double back.  

What remains of them clings to me—
their names,  gestures, their quiet inheritance.
I step forward, but the gate never closes behind me.