A Bit of Wandering

I was bored one day, so I decided to take a walk.

I found myself just outside my home. I saw the other homes in this area; each was at most three floors high, and no more than a dozen or so lengths of me wide in either direction, always with a good bit of space between it and those that surrounded it. Some of the roads were heavily beaten asphalt with cracks every now and then; others were simply beaten-down dirt that made a rough sound when my shoes landed upon it. A couple areas had sidewalks, and some places were public areas where I could walk through the grass, each step making a swish-swish before my foot hit the moist dirt underneath. It was mostly pretty quiet, save for the footsteps of others walking around and the light, sporadic tweets of birds, but I did sometimes hear other things, such as the deep calls of the mourning doves and some construction noises from work being done on some of the houses. At one point, I could hear the crackling of a bonfire, and could smell the smoke wafting away from it.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in the city. The buildings were much taller here. Nearly every one of them was fairly plain in its design, although some weren't. Everywhere seemed busy; cars drove past quite frequently, and people were walking all over. Yet despite all this activity, it felt empty. Perhaps I was just overwhelmed with it all—the noise, the sights, all of it. It all homogenized in my mind as one big blob, not the multifaceted thing that it was. About the only thing I remember is that sometimes the pavement looked different in different places—sometimes the sidewalk tiles were a slightly different shade of beige with more rocks in it, and sometimes the asphalt would have a dividing line separating the old, cracked, gray asphalt from the new, fresh, black asphalt that nevertheless also had distinct cracks in it.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in a rural area. The ground was rough here; everywhere was either dirt or gravel paths, the ground either crisping or crunching under my feet. The roads were unkempt, and frequently had plants overflowing into them; with some of them, such as the grasses, I could just keep walking and feel nothing more than a brushing across my leg, but with others, such as tree branches or other brambly things, I needed to make a concious effort to either move them out of way, my hands feeling the rough outsides as I did so, or simply walk around them. The wind blew occasionally, a consistent breeze chilling the air a little, but never to the point of discomfort. At one point, I heard the rough kerchunking of a tractor in one of the fields.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in an abandoned building. It probably wasn't safe for me to be in it; as I walked, I made sure that I always had an easy path out of it, and never touched anything I didn't understand, like the noticably rusted electrical box outside. Most of the building was on the ground floor, but there was a stairway up to a second floor; however, the boards up there were distressingly creaky, so I went back down anyway—besides, I could tell that it was most of the same anyway. The building was universally slightly damp, and in a few places the ceiling was noticably busted; I didn't dare go near those areas for fear of a collapse. Most of the doors opened, albeit some more creakily and with a little more struggle than others, but one of them was completely siezed up—I struggled with it for a while until I realized that the window was completely gone, frame and all, so I could just climb through. Each room was in at least a slight state of disrepair, and most of them were in moderate one, though one of them seemed like it had been actively trashed—there were noticably ashes on the ground and, somehow, a chair embedded completely into the wall—I left it there out of confusion on how it got there alone. There were scattered documents occasionally, but one of the desks had a whole stack of them still in it; several of them had decayed by them, and what I could read was all gibberish to me.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself somewhere mountainous. The sound of wind was constant; I found that it chilled me to the point of needing to tighten my coat around me. The ground was quite uneven here, despite all the paths. While some of the trails were okayly-kempt, others weren't—a few were less than two dozen centimeters across, though in fairness most of them connected nowhere to nowhere else. There were more than a few steep drops, but most of them were protected by a guardrail, although there were inconsistencies in their constructions: some were wooden beams, others were metal rods, and one of them seemed to be shaped out of the ground itself. There were occasional benches, some a rough and worn wood, others a newer wood, and a few that were plastic doing a spectacularly bad job of looking like wood—one of them didn't even try to look like wood, being plastic in such outlandish colors that nobody could possibly assume it was wood. A few of the benches had plaques commemorating things nobody cared about. Most of them were embedded in the ground, and those that weren't were all metal and sporadically scattered around, except for a giant haphazard pile of like twenty of them in one specific point. There was also a wooden one that was sticking out at a jaunty angle from a large blob of concrete—I don't know how anyone was supposed to get up to it, nor how they would sit on it once they did.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in a forested area. There was a distinct smell in the air from the trees—a slightly sharp smell that penetrated into my nose, but didn't do a very good job of it. Every step I took crunched with years of dried leaves and sticks underneath. The trees were scattered sporadically, but some areas were a little more dense with them than others. They seemed to be rather patternless in their spread, though at one point I found what looked to be an intentional circle of them with some stuff in the center indicating that people had been there before. People had occasionally arranged the things in the forest to make stuff, such as a set of sticks leaned around a tree, a fallen log with a chunk squarely chopped out of it to act as a bench, or a few small sticks twined together into a boxy thing I couldn't make sense of. Though the ground was mostly moist dirt, there were a few rocks scattered sporadically here and there—at one point I stumbled on a small pile of them where somebody had clearly stacked them up.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in a long-decayed land. Trees were sparse, and each one I came across was dead—fallen, chopped, splintered, destroyed, burned, or simply with no leaves and decaying branches. One of them looked like it had been struck by lightning. The ground was dry, and made a disquieting sound with each step; a sooty substance built up on my shoes as I walked through a uniform color of bleh. The plants weren't in any better shape than the trees; anything that wasn't completely trampled to the ground with all color sapped from it was brambly and unpleasant. Nevertheless, there were a few isolated places where something was still actively sprouting—a sprig from a tree's stump, or a lone flower blooming. The burst of color stood out from the rest of the landscape, representing the land's final effort to bring the lands back to what they once were by the strategies that had always worked before to keep it lively.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself amongst large structures. I couldn't discern a purpose to most of them. One had what I assumed were stairs, and they served that purpose well when I climbed them, but they were uneven in size, requiring my constant attention as I climbed them so as not to trip. But when I got to the top, I could see all around me: a hollow cylinder with a cut at an angle; an amalgamation of cubes, all parallel to each other, but following no particular grid; a series of concentric spheres with a proportionally larger and larger chunk cut out of the top of each to see the one within; a winding line following a strict grid, but no pattern, going off into the sky to nowhere in particular; a four-pronged clawlike structure, each limb at an uneven angle; a spirally thing that looked like it couldn't decide which direction to go; a large, flat triangle, point sticking into the ground; and an extremely tall obelisk. It was dead quiet at the top of this thing, and it wasn't any less so once I climbed back down to the bottom.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself amidst some dunes. The trek up the first one was tough and long, my feet plunging into the sand with every step. Traveling from one dune to the next was easier. There was occasionally some crap buried into the sand, usually some dead plant life that usually was dead wood. It wasn't completely desolate: some areas did have plenty of flora growing around them, although it was usually at the tips of the dunes and in less steep areas, and these areas were pretty isolated from one another. The dunes were very high, and the area around them rather flat and sparse; from the top, I could see the shadows of the clouds moving below. The sand made it a bit of a slog to go through, but once I got to the end, I had great fun running my way down the last dune.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself somewhere snowy. It wasn't actively snowing at the moment, but there was a thick layer of it on the ground; each step I took packed it together under my foot, creating a soft-but-not-smooth smooshing sound. The trees were coated in it; at one point, one of them couldn't bear the weight on one of its top branches, and the resulting cascade of snow from one layer to another was a sight to behold. I saw exactly one building on my trek through the snow: a small little cubic thing with no windows and two doors. It was quite chilly, and I found myself pulling on my coat to tighten it around me; luckily, I wasn't in the snowy place for too long.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself in a weird place. The ground was neither wet nor dry, but silky. The persistent smell throughout the area was one that was simultaneously firey, cold, and metallic. A strange taste, but not an unpleasant one, was on my tongue as I walked. The flora I saw was weird, and didn't seem to make any sense to me. There were paths on the ground that were hard to navigate without a map, and harder to navigate once I found one along the trails. I stumbled across a perfectly normal brick building at one point; when I went inside, I discovered a diner. I was a little hungry by this point, so I decided to get something; what I obtained was delicious.

Still, I kept walking.

I found myself at a beach. The ground did not sharply cut from grass to sand, but was dithered from one to the other. Down one way, the beach became more and more pebbly, eventually turning completely into smooth, round stones. Down the other was a sharp transition to a rough, rocky area. Before me, the water was shifting about, but not particularly wavy; nevertheless, it moved up and down the beach at the front, making a consistent rumbling noise and creating a strip of wet sand. Nearby, someone had taken some of the stones from down the beach and carefully stacked them into a masterfully-designed structure doomed to be toppled eventually.

I decided to sit and rest for a while.

After resting for a while, I rested for a little while longer.

Then, I decided to head back,
from the beach,
through the weird place,
through the snowy place,
through the dunes,
through the place with large structures,
through the long-decayed land,
through the forested area,
through the mountainous place,
through the abandoned building,
through the rural area,
through the city,
to my home.

As I walked, it started raining, droplets of water splashing on the ground in front of me, each one that landed on my clothes creating a brief little circle of wetness before its absorption. The rain was light at first, but it slowly became more and more intense. I persisted through it until I heard a thunderclap, at which point I went into a building for cover. I allowed myself to dry and warm up in the building as I listened to the sounds of the rain and thunder, muffled through the walls of the building, and watched as the raindrops pooled upon and trickled down the windows, occasionally lighting up a little with the distant flashes of lightning. But eventually the thunder stopped, the rain became less intense, and I headed back outside to continue my journey home. I wasn't walking for long before the rain came to a stop.

The sky remained grey with clouds for a while, but slowly they became whiter and fluffier; eventually, they reached a point of starting to disperse. But before they were completely gone, they stopped being white and started to turn golden as the sun set, slowly becoming a canvas of colors of more and more pinks, reds, and yellows the further the sun dipped below the horizon. They weren't the only things affected; everything was gilded with the shine of the sunset as the nighttime came every closer. When the sun had gone, the clouds started to darken and turn blue as the wind whisked them away. All around me, the landscape was cast in a deeper and deeper shadow as the nighttime crept ever closer. Slowly, the moon came into view; not too long afterwards, so did the stars.

When I finally arrived back home, I was glad I had gone on that walk.