We Long for a Sign

It could have been a moment that took time in its grasp and turned everything back on itself; a time when time itself began again. Each moment hangs there, waiting and we wait too, as though expecting something, some sign to show us which way to turn.

These days though, there is not much left of the roads; sometimes they disappear altogether merging with the grass and the undergrowth. So when we come to a crossroads like this, there is no sign, no indication of which way leads where. It is then that time begins again. Each new turning is a new life, a new possibility, a chance for change and happenstance to take all we have and all we have known and replace it with something new.

We travel on, searching for some sign that goes beyond mere direction. We long for a sign that points towards the lives we have lost, left behind, long before each crossroads became a new beginning. We search for those lives we used to have before the disaster, before the catastrophe.

Each of us, deep down knows that there is no route, no road, that will lead us back, back beyond all these turnings we have taken, to our old lives, back to how it was before. Yet, even deeper down, there is a longing for those familiarities, those certainties, of the old life that even now we have trouble recalling or even naming to ourselves. We just hope that the next crossroads we stumble upon will be the one that has a sign pointing back to those old lives and a road to take us back there.