Closer to the Sun || A Fairy Tale on Hiking Trails

1.2 - Luís - Familiar Colorado Pavement

A/N – Merry Christmas! Nothing stops the update train! Now I'm going to go watch The Grinch for the 87,000,000th time. <3

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As he always did, Luís dreamt of straight lines.

He dreamt of a single-track trail, just wide enough for his own two feet to press one after the other into silty smooth ground. It was Washington dirt, and Columbia dirt, and Portugal dirt, and Colorado dirt, a dreamy synthesis of every trail he'd walked since he first decided to spend his life following the tracks laid by others. In his dreams he was everywhere, following the footsteps of elders into places unseen by him, but into places Seen. The trails had been blazed. He was merely enjoying fruits of the labor of adventurers past. Here and there he snapped a branch that grew in the way of the path. His footsteps kept the path in walking shape. Here and there, he erected a small cairn of stones to keep travelers on the right track when the path got muddied.

In his dreams, though, the path was certain. It was a straight cut of white in a midnight landscape. Lines crisscrossed the blackness of his vision – paths he had walked, paths he had not yet walked, hundreds and hundreds of days and thousands of miles and millions of feet where he had placed his own – millions of cuts of trail, white comets in the night sky. They streaked and faded, blurs of gray and blue, the ephemera of ancient stars. Pearls of rain, falling down through the gravity of his pupils. Perfect gashes of white through charcoal. His mama, Lucy, had always believed that dreams meant something. But then, his mom, Charlie, believed Lucy was too superstitious for her own good.

The bus shuddered and his eyes flashed open. The raindrops disappeared. Beyond the bus window spread a field of green-golden grass. Mountains rose above the plains to touch a cornflower sky, so wide and blue that he ached.

Luís's seat partner still slept. The stranger snored quietly, pale face half-hidden by his hood, head resting inches from Luís's left shoulder. He didn't seem to mind the fact that Luís smelled like a sun-baked sock. There was dirt caked so thick on his ankles that he could barely see his leg hair, and he had run out of the deodorant he bought in a Las Cruces drug store on Day 18 on the Continental Divide Trail.

Honestly, the ability of the man to stay fast asleep was flattering.

As the Greyhound took a wide curve, the landscape went from any-old-Colorado-plains familiar to hometown familiar. The streets became those crooked lines etched into his muscle memory, burned into his hands against the steering wheel of his first car. They knitted into a quilt of memory. There was the old barn where he'd first gotten drunk at fifteen with the other burnouts of his high school. There was the roundabout where his drivers ed teacher docked him points for failing to yield the right of way to a slow-moving tractor.

Home. The place he was always trying to leave.

Today might have been the first day he was truly excited to return to Soledad from one of his long escapades in the North American trail system. He loved his moms and his cousin and his grandmas, and he knew they were eagerly awaiting his arrival, and he always missed them when he was gone, but today was the first day he could remember that something unexpected was awaiting him at the bus station. Today was the first day he knew he would get off the bus, but didn't know what he would find.

As soon as Luís had gotten back into cell service that morning, he'd messaged Sun-Shy. None of their previous messages had included a proper introduction. A number of times, Luís had thought to ask their name, but something about the anonymous interaction felt sacred.

Do you know what lies in the woods outside of Soledad?

The bus coasted down a meandering off-ramp and the subdivision where Luís's moms lived approached on the left side. There was no way they would see him through the window. He ducked anyway. Luís had texted Charlie and Lucy that he'd missed his connecting bus in Denver, and that he was waylaid there for the evening. It wouldn't be suspected as a lie. Luís never lied to his moms. He ducked his head below the window and out of view as the bus trundled past the frontage road that his moms' house overlooked. His seat partner cast him a quizzical side-eye. Luís, from his awkward stoop, nodded congenially at him.