Which Way Might I Turn?

He stood at a break in the road.

The rocky, muddied path split from one to four, so that he stood in the middle of a crossroads with one stretching to the right, one to the left, and two more before and behind him. Above hung the sky, and the sun, and the clouds, and below spread the dirt and the soil and the dry dead leaves that whispered as they tumbled over the rocks in the wake of autumn’s chilling breath.

Four roads.

Four futures.

One past.

He slipped his hand into his coat pocket, wrapping his fingers around the cold metal of the small brass compass his grandfather had given him, years ago, when he was a boy. He took it out and rubbed his finger over the engraving on the cover, thinking about the old tales his family kept alive on moonlit nights; tales of lost souls and magic compasses that pointed to where the owner needed (not wanted) to go. Of course, it was up to the possessor of the compass to decide whether or not he would travel down the path given to him.

If only this compass were such a one.

His grandfather, firm believer in the old Irish proverbs (though he was only one-quarter Irish himself) had often quoted the words which were inscribed on the compass, ‘in every land, hardness is in the north of it, softness in the south, industry in the east, and fire and inspiration in the west.’

He opened the compass, and looked north where the red arrow pointed.

There, he saw the snow-brushed mountains rising in the distance, pale grey on the face of a deep blue sky. The trail which led to those mountains was rocky, ragged, and dotted at the edge with gnarled oak trees, but father on it straightened out to a smooth, solid path alongside the bank of a green lake, where it bent off into the distance, and out of sight. Hardness, yes, but beauty also. So much beauty in the low-slung mist over the water, in the wing of a passing raven, in the rawness of the snow glittering in the pre-sunset light. Empty and desolate, but pure in the memory of what lay behind him.

He turned, looked south, to the road where he had come from.

There, he saw the jagged peaks of city spires and the glint of red sun on high-rise windows. The road his dusty footprints still lay upon was not a difficult one. Flat, wide, and smooth, recently paved. It would be an easy walk back. But what lay at the end…south, for him, was not soft. It was harsh, it was broken, it was a past that he did not like to recall, but was so easy to fall back into. South was golden, but it was also bleak, and relentlessly tugging at his will, whispering at him to return.

He shielded his eyes and looked westward.

There, he saw a land struck with the sunset. The land old writers made into kingdoms, into eternal heavens across the horizon. The land that dropped away into cliffs and rocky coast, where endless waves thundered on the sand in the windswept whitecaps. No trail. No bridge. Only the wide, wide sea and possibilities as endless as the leagues that separated land from land.

He turned east, putting the setting sun at his back.

There, long shadows stretched across the grass between shards of golden light. The trail was dirt, marked with the footsteps of many others. In some places it fell away into water-logged ditches or crawled up steep hills, but at the end of the roughness he knew there lay a different sort of place, where nobody cared who he was, where he could be whoever he wanted, and where life could begin anew with little temptation of returning to the old.