Where do you go when the only thing motivating you forward is what’s behind you? It’s simply not something I do, running toward some unknown destination. I am the one doing it though, right? I don’t feel any other influence. No, I was the one who decided to go, but that was just about the last decision I made.

My feet carried me along, a leaf lost in a hail storm, carried onward while being pelted and battered into an unrecognizable shape. Something deformed and hideous to myself. Part of me wonders if that’s what he wants after all.

It wasn’t actually hailing the night I ran from my childhood home. A sentence that tasted expired, roughly 20 years past acceptable. I wasn’t suffering any physical blows to my person, but each step I took toward this unknown destination had a noticeable effect on me.

For a moment, I thought of going to Clara’s place, but quickly beat such a stupid idea from my mind. It was probably his suggestion, but even if it was born of my own desperate psyche, I knew that I couldn’t go there. That certainty emboldened me that all of this must be part of his scheme, and if he truly thought that fleeing to her would solve things, he deserved less credence than I had already given him.

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After walking aimlessly up one block and then down another, I found myself at a true crossroads. It would have only taken me ten minutes to walk to the grassy hill by the train stop if I had walked there directly. Now, an hour of walking had made me weary. I checked my watch. There was no way a train would be running this late. Still, I climbed up the steps to the platform, and sat on a bench, my bag on the seat next to me.

I don’t know how long I was conscious while waiting, but when I did wake, the train had stopped in front of me. The doors opened to this lonely platform. Part of me wondered whether at some point during the night I had become the last person on Earth.

Of course, that wasn’t true. A few sleepy passengers got on at the subsequent stops. I rode the train all the way into the city, where the chill from the night seemed to finally catch up to me. I walked to a slightly rundown hotel that I had only driven past in my youth. Not the type of place one ended up if there had been any sort of planning ahead of time.

I know that I didn’t have to stay here. I could’ve just caught a cab to the airport and been back home in my normal life. It occurred to me that I might be falling further into the labyrinth that he had laid out for me. If so, all I could do was tip my cap to him. He had opened up some part of me that I did not know existed. I was curious, and I needed to find answers, even if it led to my demise.