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ɪɴᴀɴɪᴍᴀᴛᴇ [ɪɴˈæɴɪᴍɪᴛ]
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I am the rusted, manmade path. I twist and snake my way through man’s boundaries, those self-imposed divisions. Personally, I quite like the idea of that. How silly, how pointless. It makes me laugh. Section off some land, then lay the foundations of an escape through it. That’s where I come in, laid strip by painstaking strip – an inanimate skeletal framework.
Oftentimes, they rip me out of the ground and send me elsewhere. Branching north, east, south, west. Under hill and over sea – until the malignant red-brown flecks appear again. The first signs of flaking can send the cars tumbling and the humans flying. Centripetal force-driven swerves, the glorious thrill of what if? Then the slightest rattle as the wheels clear the curve, your bated breath as the moment passes. And I lie around the next bend, watching. Waiting.
But please don’t fret. I am not spiteful, I am not your enemy, unless I fall victim to the elements. All’s well and good in the sun-warmed sands of summer and the speckled crystalline flowers of winter. Its spring I fear, the earliest dew-drops and echoes of salt-stained coasts on the humid air. I never hear the rhythm of the wheels, rat-tat-tat in the ears of the passengers. There’s only the wind’s song, the occasional bird screaming past, and the fragments like a drawn-out scale spanning kilometers. Piece them together, slide the jigsaw into place, and you might find my story.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and grazes;
And there is a green for stringing daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
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