Fernweh

I drove past roadkill, a lonely deer lying rather peacefully on the side of a broken road,

and I wonder if the deer ever questioned why she was never protected,

why the beauty of the trees, and the smell of verdant moss surrounding the trunks of   ethereal evergreens that was created to be enjoyed by her, had only been destroyed to satisfy someone else.

I wonder if she wanted to know what was on the other side of that road full of treachery. Her heart filled with fernweh.

That maybe life does not have to be sectioned into one small garden of bramble and wildflowers. Maybe there was somewhere worth living.

And so she crosses the road, but the last thing she’ll remember is how she was so close to getting there, to discover, but not what it’d truly had been like if she were to arrive.

So was it better to die trying with the tranquil imagination that life would be different , or to die realizing that the other side would be the same as the path she had previously taken.