Road Narrows:

The future occurs every second, every millisecond, and the road narrows to the head of a pin as it expands outward. I once had a vision of a circle, but that was inaccurate. Now, it is only a line.
The year is 1997.
There is a road that meanders up a hill in lower Westchester County, NY, hidden by a wall of trees. Nothing extraordinary.
At night, this road is pitch dark, save for a lone streetlight located where the road turns at a ninety-degree angle. From afar, the light in the corner resembles a lamp illuminating the corner of a room. The line begins there, veering to the right.
I am more alone here than I have ever been, and the feeling is markedly positive. I’ve cast off the normal trappings of the nineteen-year old college sophomore, the libidinous frustration, the late night parties, the part-time dead end jobs, the uneasiness of the transitory state of being between adolescence and adulthood. All of this, shed like a snake’s skin. Here, I am ageless and inevitably saved. No one is aware of me here in the dark, sauntering down this road. I sense that I am folding into a void of time as I walk to the corner where the light shines down, and then turn the right hand corner into more darkness.
Further down, another lit landmark appears in the form of the US flag. A quarter of a mile beyond it, the road continues toward an intersection where the local library is flanked by the local post office. Beyond this point is another stretch of road leading toward Route 684.
Somewhere within the boundaries between these passages, the mood shifts. I feel as if I am chasing my own shadow cast by random streetlights, which are scarce. More accurately, I appear to be running from phantoms of people and places I had once known. I see myself committing this act, and it seems cowardly. It seems as if am trying to escape the world in vain. It’s a foolish act. There is no escape. Better to confront the world. Better to turn back.
Back within the boundaries of the campus, a police car pulls up alongside me with flashing lights. I stop in my tracks. Worst-case scenario would be a case of mistaken identity. Instead, the cop simply asks me why I am walking around campus so late. I tell him I was just taking a walk. I decide to be truthful about it, adding that I am an art student who gathers inspiration from late night walks. “Late night? It’s four am in the morning bro! Are you nuts?” is his swift response. Next, “Let’s see your ID”. I show him my student ID and my driver’s license.
He proceeds to check my license to see if I have any prior offenses attached to my name. When nothing comes up, save for a speeding ticket that had already been paid, I figure I am clear. Besides, I was walking. At the end of it, he gives me a brief look of suspicion while confiding to a fellow officer over his CB the contents of our meeting. “Alright, go home. Try to find some other way to get ‘inspired’, you know? It’s too late to be walking around”.
In total compliance, I walk back to my apartment (the cop car casually and slowly follows me from a considerable distance). My overriding thought at this moment is that I don’t fully belong to the contemporary world of curfews, property lines and surveillance, but that I must be better prepared to deal with such realities, regardless of my impulse to venture out freely. The prospect of such a life ever increasing with time fills me with an specific kind of sadness; the sort of sadness one feels when moving out of a place they’ve lived in all their life. Few hiding places remain.
Frontiers exist on a tight budget. There aren’t many left here. The mind is quickly becoming the only frontier left, but what good is a mind when it has so little to explore that is new? The woods are government property, as is the field, the riverbed and the cliff side. It’s difficult to know whether or not my own mind contains such boundaries as well.