224 A Journey's Journal

I was born on a dead-end street: viz., "Dead End Steet." I had nowhere to go but sideways. That's when Val took a wrong turn and ended up knocking on my door. She was a mess—disheveled, black-eyed, and bruised with needle tracks.

I imprisoned her, because that's what we people do to others who bumble onto Dead End Street.

I watched her seizures, convulsions, and profuse sweating. I listened as she hurled the most vile invectives at me, her captor. I checked her pulse as it waxed and waned and listened for her breathing, sometimes with a mirror, as it flowed and ebbed.

As her poisons met their half-lives half-way, I became half-interested in Val the girl. No, Val the woman.

Her incoherencies detangled. Her rationales collated. She became self-aware of the person she was deep inside. The original Val.

She became lovely.

We made love at just the right time in her metamorphosis. For all the right reasons. I had saved her life.

She was saving mine.

I was astonished at what a little nutrition can do. I was impressed how one can advance and progress—and both of them stick—with merely standing upright and navigating the world at head level. At line-of-sight level. That's when I first saw her beautiful eyes.

It may have been my imagination, but I thought I noticed a spark.

We left Dead End Street and hit the road—together. We walked hand-in-hand on the Less Taken Road and matriculated in the School of Hard Knocks: our prep school had more than prepared us. We graduated with street smarts—with honors—and embarked on the long and winding road.

That money thing!

There came a little. Then more. At a crossroads, we now could pay our way.

We finally came to a fork in the road: one way promised a stop sign up ahead; the other promised nothing. So we chose the ignorance of promise, the bumps in it notwithstanding, over the knowns at the end of the road.

Now we are clean: me of languishing lethargy and she of her dark ways. We saw ourselves past the properties on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams and now happily pay the mortgage on Easy Street.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Sunday, August 11, Day 224 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

Accompaniment photos were AI-generated but the potholes were not.

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THIS CHALLENGE GRINDS ON, 366 WORDS AT A TIME...

There are currently three surviving prolific, pretentious, promiccuous, and copacetic Vocal writers still participating in the insane, inane, pre-election 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator

• Rachel Deeming (challenge participant)

• Gerard DiLeo (bulbous actuator)

Read them. Support them. And take the road less taken, bumps and all!