million steps

He was walking away, confused legs in ambivalent motion and aiming towards the horizon that led directly opposite the love his heart harbored for many years. He was moving away from her in small steps, heart taking giant leaps backward with every beat, ever wondering what could've been, what was lost. He raised the white flag in his fight against change, finally opening his eyes from a perfectly conjured illusion, so real and so true. He was breaking away from a dream that had become his world while battling the rush of pain hoping to stay awake.

He looked at the golden skies ahead, bathed by the last light of the day. He watched as the high winds shape and mold the clouds that eventually grew dark, disintegrating against the black space of night as the sun hid behind the hills and around to the other side of the world. He imagined the remains of his emotions ebbing away from him and back. He imagined his love retreating like how the somber light of the sunset crept back from the dusk. It was almost unfathomable how it once effortlessly covered the stretched boundaries of the heavens and that within a blink of an eye be reduced into a simple sad reminder that everything ends, that everything fades; leaving in its tracks an expanse of empty nothingness, so wide that not even a conscious happy thought could wade.

He walked on and stared at the sharp silhouettes of power lines blunting in the daylight's demise. For a moment, it was completely dark. He stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes from everything. He fully sensed the cold wind rushing against his face, whispering turbulent sounds in his ears, egging him to go back. But he wouldn't. He waited for something to disturb the monotonous hum of unknown possibilities he was in.

Where to go?

When he opened his eyes, bokeh lights hovered ahead, slowly shrinking, sharpening as his pupils adjust to the dark environment. Stars revealed themselves from above, like sprinkles of hope he could not taste--destinies etched criss-crossing in the face of the universe, bridges of chance for hearts to love, and to be broken, and to heal and to love again. But he couldn't see it that way for he still had to take a million steps away from a love that was great and was true and ten steps more from the loneliness he would carry in his journey through and around that wide expanse of nothingness to the other side where abstract dreams and solid reality collide under a shining new sun...