MAGPIE TALE: Along the Route

Another Monday, another Magpie Tale

Can you imagine a life beyond the fray, beyond the foes --
those imagined and those you have embedded,
your very soul pock-marked from so many
explosive anticipations that finally fizzled but left you scarred nonetheless.
You just want to go back to that safe place at the soda fountain
at Kress' beneath the stool where your mother had a limeaid and you
perused the tabloids of lives saucily sordid and you never dreamed that you
would someday come to live.
How far you've journeyed now from Tierra de Fuego and Ha Giang and
Catalonia and the far edge of Bellingham, Washington and back.
Your route is far from complete, but you snap a handy torch now
to glance back as far as the light will travel. There is much more back
there that is hiding in the shadows.
Try as you may, you can never put all the puzzle pieces back together
to retrace what brought you here. The crumbs you dropped along the way
were gobbled up decades ago. And now you can barely recognize these musty
volumes of your description of the path that brought you here.