Some blessing on the atrophied festival path says, “Wake up little buddy!” and now I’m mystified, now I’m doing an elated backstroke in whimsy. I could hop on his cart for a quick ride to who’s-to-say, or I could roll down either of the boastful declines on both sides of me. Perhaps I could borrow a fallen bicycle—We’re all going to the same place at whatever rate. This’s prevalent in me now so much so that I deign to make my way further by my own. There are a mingling of present faces I can’t recollect coming the way I did, and I wonder if they faced the same conundrum I did (stay or go?). Likely no, as some of them heard to celebrities and idols in the road and it’s all the same. And, lo, I am back to camp, where the transient loosens his belt for imperishable foodstuffs and easy, easy anecdotes.
Morning-time and dusk is peeking through my tentative blink. Squirrels and festival-goers wash up and run in circles around me, waiting for a meal. In my waking euphoria I’m somehow sure it’s a crowd beseeching me, grabbing at my ankles, instead of their interdependent own. Well I’m done from this and I pull myself up by my knees, coming to the deflating realization I’ve nowhere to be. Salright I’m someplace now and I’m meant to trade that for what? What but sullen photographs and restless standing in front of stages? I don’t complain, though, I save my resentment for those who move too much and those days I can’t sit. And when there’s the hatred of standing for its vanity why find any other reason to savor my recumbence?
The sun makes it’s way above me like a dog on a leash on a stake and so it goes I’ve stood and walked, like I so resisted. Time, though, had me straight beat when it got me in its grip, and so it was inevitable I would abandon my intention. In that time that morning came and went I had a meal, and a nod-hello to a few of the selection of strangers. Oh, and I got so full, I had been starving for confabulation, I’d been subsisting on meaning and effectual talk. Hadn’t I once taken a break to give a foreign friend what I needed so madly and what I had so much of? So went my morning, it’s end consisting of more butterfly-intricacies like these, all these dwellings in neurosis.
When noon came high I was feasting continually, celebrating with my friends who had come from their tents in thousands to see me and perhaps the spectacle that was organic association. O, and I’m elated with it all.
Thinking of morning I’m relieved to have been alone and embarrassed of myself. What foolish contrarian was I being, sitting there on the ground, stubbornly closing my eyes to exalted beauty in trees and dirt? I’m glad to be in company now that I’m illuminated, standing before thousands with a lollipop stick raised to the beauteous trees pretending that it’s me the grass and people look to, because it’s the festival spirit.
It’s a blessing as that stranger who saw my tiring eyes one day was. I’ve come to be obsessed with the Festival Dynamic. I could talk forever of it, there’s a thousand focal points and so many hills, so many wondrous dust clouds playing at my ankle like children. So few disapproving faces are lost in seas of so many glad minds, and nods—nods here are indispensable. In such a feast on simplicity and subtlety the nod is an inimitable delicacy. It’s a bastion of content, I say to you, cities and towns of my unenlightened past. O, and the highwaymen who busy themselves on city fringes and those who can’t be the city or the highwayman, they know to find me here, star struck.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...