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I drove in almost complete darkness for hours having left the city. The highway lights got few, got sparse, and then abandoned me altogether- left me in the company of roads too infrequently traveled to be pot marked. Road signs nobody read. It was warm enough to leave the windows open and my speakers screamed out my questions into the night, but my headlights brought no answers. There wasnt so much a destination as a need to just be away from the things I knew. Being there hadnt brought me any clarity and I really, really needed clarity. Coyotes watched me streak through the empty dessert roads- streaking towards nothing- a low, low comet shooting in reverse under the  night sky. After a time and for no reason I slowed, turned off the road into a driveway with no sign and a fence that stretched both directions into the dark. I sat there with that dark at the fence guarding nothing for a time listening to the engine before finally turning off the car and then we sat in silence and let the light from the sky slowly fade in. Free from the city lights pollution, the stars burned fierce here. Untamed. Unbroken. Here, they remembered they were the most primal and awesome force in the sky. More numerous than anything I had ever heard of or would ever know burning hot shiny bright in the darkness a million million miles away. I looked up at them. They looked down on me.

I awoke sometime later, dawns light threatening to crest the hills I could now tell were far off in the east. And then they were there. Looming high and giant around me, windmills turned slowly, ceaselessly, having completed their vigil watching over me in the night.  My cheeks were stained with tears. Some time, late in the night while I slept, the deep sadness I’d been fleeing caught up with me, and danced with me, rocked me back to sleep and passed. I stepped from the car, and stretched high into ‘pre-day’ then a low rustle from the wind and my cars soft door open tones made the first voices I’d heard in forever. The last of the stars turned away from me, and their sweet sister Sol climbed over the hills and bathed the valley from her pink and orange perch high in the skies over Texas. I left my arms high and closed my eyes to greet her. Breathed deep in the new day. There was acceptance there, born sometime the night before. I turned, and stepped down to the road still lonely, still abandoned save me and stared off in one direction then the other. After, when I was decided, I climbed back into the car and turned back to the road, used my turn signal, then drove on into the new day the same direction Id been going.

Forward.