Sam

 

 

 

Sam Hastings woke in a stupor: with a headache that felt bad enough to have killed someone; except that that someone was him - like someone or something was squashing his skull, as though it was being squeezed inside a vice. He opened his eyes and looked around: the same old trailer with the rotten roof. Was this anyway to live? Who knew? Who new anything? For reasons he himself didn’t fully understand, he had gone off the grid: Sam Hastings, the lone cowboy. But hadn’t it always been the case? If anyone had bothered to ask him what he wanted to do with his life, he would have told them the same thing: that was, if he was being truthful: he would have told them that he wanted to travel, and other than that, he really didn’t know. Well, now here it was. He had managed the travelling part, but as to any other thing... What started out as a sort of an adventure had become a way of life, and if anybody else had asked him, he would tell them: if he was being truthful: that he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Just him and the open road and time, a lot of time to himself, to sit and think and ponder and just be. To be so passionate about one’s own company, he knew was rare, and more than a little strange, but that didn’t bother him either. He got out of the bed and, for a second, felt like hurling, then gathered himself and fell back down, vowing to quit drinking, then fell back to sleep.

It was night when he woke again next. He looked out the tiny window in the van, out at the night, and could make out a horizon that was a gold band in the darkness, then decided, suddenly, to start moving again. He wasn’t entirely sure how long he had been where he was, could it have been months? Maybe, more? But always, the same general gut feeling that would tell him it was time to move on, and he trusted it, and, besides, the money was starting to run down.

The van started on its first go and he took it as a further sign, then turned the lights on and started making his way out from the bit of desert that he had found. Slowly, but surely, crossing it and then making it out onto the open road, glad that his head had subsided, glad that he had started the long hall to…wherever.

The road showed nothing, only the steady strip and the long black night, and it was the way he wanted it.