The Ones Who Never Left

There was a road, a path, a way. No one remembered who made it. Some say it was always there.

It was simply there, worn into the earth by feet older than memory, the grass pressed flat, the stones turned smooth by passing. It went somewhere. Everyone who walked it knew this, not because they had been told, but because the walking itself told them. Something in the body recognized the direction even when the eyes could not see ahead.

For a long time there were no signs.

Then a man came back.

He had walked the road to its end and returned, and he was changed in ways he could not fully speak. Out of love — only out of love, there was nothing else in him at that moment — he cut a post and set it in the ground at the place where the road began, where it was easy to miss, where the grass had not been pressed down enough to make the path visible to an eye that did not already know to look. He carved an arrow. He pointed it true.

Then he walked back into his life and eventually he died.

Others came. Some saw the sign and walked. Some stood before the sign and felt something move in them and followed it down the road and did not look back. These ones also changed, in the same way the man had changed, in ways they could not fully speak.

But some stood before the sign and found the sign itself remarkable.

They studied it. They measured the angle of the arrow. They debated whether the post was the right wood, whether the carving had been done with sufficient care, whether the man had fully understood what the sign was pointing at when he erected it. They wrote careful accounts of the sign. They taught their children the accounts. They built a shelter over the sign to protect it from weather, and the shelter became a building, and the building became an institution, and the institution appointed keepers, and the keepers kept.

Pilgrims arrived from great distances and were brought before the sign and shown its meaning and examined on their understanding and sent away satisfied. The keepers were kind. They were not corrupt men. They loved the sign with a love that was real, as real as they knew how to make it, and they believed that tending it was the same as honoring what it pointed at.

---

Far away, in a country where the sign had never been erected, where no one had heard of the man or the arrow he erected or the institution that grew around it, a woman woke before dawn with an ache she could not name. She had felt it for years. She had tried to fill it with the things available to her and none of them had filled it. One morning she simply rose and walked in the direction the ache pulled her and did not stop.

The terrain was hard. There were no markers. There were stretches of darkness where she moved by feel alone, where the only evidence that she was still on a path was that her feet kept finding ground.

She walked for a long time.

She arrived.

She could not have said where she was. She had no words for it that would have satisfied the keepers of the sign, had she ever met them, had they ever thought to ask. But she was there. The thing the ache had always been reaching toward received her, and she was changed, in the way the man had been changed, in ways she could not fully speak.

---

The keepers still tend the sign.

They are not wicked men. On certain evenings, when the light falls at a particular angle and no one is asking them questions, one of them will sometimes look at the arrow, and follow its direction with his eyes, and feel something he cannot name pull briefly at him, like a current beneath still water.

He looks away. There are duties. He must maintain the sign.