Notes From a Road I Didn’t Plan

 

ENCOUNTER #1

The Man Who Walked Beside Me Without Speaking

I was walking because the room I had been sitting in had begun to feel like a held breath.
The road outside was narrow, unfinished, the kind that pretends it knows where it is going.

I walked without music. Without urgency.
Just the sound of my steps negotiating with the earth.

That was when I noticed him.

He did not approach.
He did not announce himself.
He simply aligned his pace with mine, as if our footsteps had been practicing for this moment in secret.

For a while, I let him stay unnamed.
Some presences ask for nothing and still offer relief.

The sky was undecided between colors.
Dusk, that patient negotiator, hovered above us.

I wondered how long he had been there.
The question felt unimportant the moment it formed.

He looked ordinary in a way that made me uneasy.
No signs. No symbols. No theatrical wisdom hanging from his coat.
Yet the space between us felt… arranged.

I broke first.

“Do you always walk this road?”

He didn’t answer.
Not because he couldn’t, but because he chose not to interrupt what was already happening.

His silence wasn’t empty.
It had weight. It slowed my thoughts until they stopped tripping over themselves.

After a while, he spoke, not turning his head.

“Most people mistake movement for escape.”

The words did not land like advice.
They sat beside me, breathing.

I felt the strange urge to explain myself.
Why I was walking.
What I was leaving behind.
What I hoped might loosen if I kept going.

He lifted his hand slightly. Not to stop me. To release me.

“You don’t have to narrate your life to be allowed to live it.”

We walked again.
The road curved. Or perhaps we did.

I noticed then that he matched my pauses, not just my steps.
When I slowed, he slowed.
When I hesitated, the air seemed to hesitate too.

“You walk like someone listening,” he said.

“To what?” I asked.

He smiled, the way people do when they don’t want to shrink an answer into language.

“When you’re ready to hear it, it won’t need a name.”

A dog barked somewhere distant.
A window closed.
The world continued, politely.

I turned my head to look at him.

There was only the road.

No retreating footsteps.
No dramatic vanishing.

Just the sense that something had been returned to me, gently, without receipt.

I kept walking.

For the first time in a long while,
I wasn’t trying to arrive.

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🌑
Some encounters don’t add to your life.
They remove the noise.

A motivational writer