The strain was showing. I'd left everything behind, including the things that mattered. No matter. My emotions blew hot and cold like the gully winds that flowed down from the upper slopes. The day seemed endless.

Beyond caring, I limped towards life with memories for a crutch. The landscape was a tumbled mess, a broken promise from a spoiled child. Nobody knew then what they were not to know later. Time leaked away like a dripping faucet.

Animals had retreated to the past, when life was lush and humanity gibbered and frolicked. I was there at the beginning and each cell knows it. The future begins now. I beat the same path to the same dead-end, dimly aware of my own existence and careless of all else. My thoughts were never my own.

The signs are all around us. Words are too easy, ciphers for the truth, footprints towards our prey. It was never thus, a mother's son and artless bastard coming together on the empty page to dance the night away. I drift in and out of consciousness, hoping for hope and laughing at hyenas.

Sleep abandoned me to my own devices, letting me ooze back to consciousness. Breathless with desire for the unknown, I crawled before I could walk and gazed at the event horizon of the day. Morning was ever thus, a receding fantasy of expectations.

I had hoped that the excoriating sun would burn away the lies in that empty place. There was only me and the other me, that shadowy figure that haunted my existence and dogged my footsteps. I was unsure who was who and why.

In the morning I was neither one thing nor the other. My failings had been absorbed into a conglomerate nightmare, like geese in a sack, all striving to free themselves while attacking the other. I was a random animal.