The Long Road Behind You

The days begin to fold into one another. Morning frost gives way to the dull ache of noon and then to the long blue cool of evening, and then it all comes round again, and again, until you stop counting. You learn the exact weight of your pack to the ounce, and the two or three places along the straps where it will always, no matter how you shift it, rub you raw by dusk. Your feet find their own rhythm and keep it whether you attend to them or not.

The land itself changes so slowly that you never quite catch it in the act — grassland thinning imperceptibly to scrub and stone, the far hills shifting over the days from soft green to grey to the hard bright white of distant, snow-capped peaks. You speak less and less as the miles pile up behind you; there is a companionable quiet that settles over travellers who have run out of new things to say. At night the fire is small and the dark around it is very large, and the road you have already walked stretches away behind you, a little further with every dawn, until the place you first set out from has come to feel less like home and more like something that happened, long ago, to someone else entirely.