STEPS

PROLOGUE

Her predictions had been bland, vague, impersonal; her voice pretentious, the tone in tune with those celluloid seers in old movies. My disgust and feeling cheated of forty dollars argued about over copious amounts of alcohol for hours afterwards.

"No money," this Seer had said, surprising me. "I was passing by. You needed me."

"For free? Really?" He'd had my attention then. "So what do you see in my future?" The question proffered with interest, his statement about need rousing curiosity for I certainly needed something those days.

"Happiness is in the now."

"What do you mean?"

"If you do not find the answers, they will find you."

"I don't understand you. Your words are riddles!"

"They are lessons. You have many lessons ahead of you."

"You said later, right?" I'd reminded him, focusing attention on the only positive thing he'd voiced. "Success, you said. How much later?"

"Ah, you are an impatient one." His benign, yellow-toothed smile had only served to frustrate me further.

"I want to know!" I did. Success and I, well, we'd seemed odd partners, an ill-fitting marriage - yeah - I was in a fucking ill-fitting marriage, contemplating an affair, consumed by an infatuation threatening everything!

"Have you a pen and some paper?"

I'd dug into a drawer and produced a pen. The paper torn from the ever-present yellow legal pad I carried everywhere.  

He'd written facing away from me, folding the page several times then placing it in my palm, closing my fingers around it.

"I must leave now." His parting words again attended by a benign smile.

"Wait! You haven't told me anything! I want to ask -"

"Your hand will guide you."

I'd followed him to the door, watched as he turned the corner at the end of the block, not venturing into any of the other stores lining the long strip. I had expected him to be spreading his enigmatic prophesies and that benign smile door to door.

I remembered feeling displaced afterwards. Had it happened? Had he been real? The paper read over several times then folded again and placed between the pages of a book I had just finished reading. My mind soon distracted, the incident forgotten. The book taken home lost among the others on my bookshelves, packed and re-packed many times over the decades; the piece of paper misplaced and disremembered until this move.

I re-read the brief text written over thirty years ago, mentally ticking off each of the fortune cookie prophesies: Two sons later in life. Yep. A difficult journey? An understatement! Fear, misfortune, unattained love. Sure. The rest of it however held me spell-bound, my brain topsy-turvy. Words once too abstract for a young mind to absorb and disseminate now burgeoned with substance. The old Seer had traced my journey faultlessly!

Questions bubbled and troubled my already disturbed thinking. How had he known? And how the fuck had I followed the direction of those simple sentences without deviation and despite never once referencing them?

For a week, I kept the paper close. Unfolding, reading, folding again. In-between, I toyed with the handful of stories begun over the years and never finished: One describing a huge tsunami, surging into our bay. A further dubious adventure, my fictional self and my two sons typically tasked with saving the world. A series of short, feel-good tales; begun as therapy after surviving several wordless years.

One last reading and refolding later, I began writing on a new page. Steady, concentrated verbal gushing. Hour after hour, fingers tapping out the journey of my life! Haphazard chunks of words, emerging independent at first then becoming interwoven; isolated events and conversations meshing over the weeks into a coherent and identifiable pattern. I pressed on, clacking the keys, resenting every intrusion, anything causing distance between my fingers and the keyboard.

The film reel of this journey streaming past as I hunted down the defining moment beginning my eventual delivery to here. Back and forth through memories, connecting and isolating. Experiencing again the sorrows, the times I landed on my arse - plenty of those. Recalling the few smiles, the copious tears, the ever-present silence of loneliness and isolation.

The piece of paper steering my recounting... fifty-five years of taking steps; branching out in every direction lacking even the semblance of a plan. A single pace here, some reluctant strides there. Looping back often; surging ahead, each mad rush ignoring even the most basic of road rules. Lost and confounded sometimes, bored too often. Alone for most of it.

The preceding decades seemingly focused only on the going, the walking towards, whatever final destination further ahead than I could have anticipated. None of the random steps appearing related until I found myself stopped, looking back at the labyrinthine journey leading me here.

Two hundred-some pages later, I finally finished typing. I'd written my story. Viewed as a whole in hindsight, my tangled walking now appeared a dedicated pilgrimage, not the assumed meandering.

"Huh, that's why this happened and that happened. So I could end up right here, right now."

The pause suggested some completion, for I was experiencing in my final standing still the prospect of having arrived at a precise destination. Yet how could it be possible, when I'd lived unaware during the months, years, decades consumed taking supposed aimless strides? Why did this ending - for it surely resembled an ending - why did it manifest now?