＃１２６

    All my life, I have run a maze—no ordinary maze, but one of continental proportion. Though it winds, as mazes do, constantly and confusingly, there is yet a sense of forward motion. Of being corralled more north than south... funneled towards an end I do not know by a design nobody has explained. At times, the walls close so thin that I must shuffle sideways through them, catching branch and drawing blood. At other times, they fall away at right angles over the horizon as though I have left the maze at last. But give it a day, or a week or a year, no matter in which direction I proceed, and the walls close in again... the first new glimmer of hedge the very same as the last, in devastating confirmation that I have not escaped the maze but merely traversed some great clearing within it.
    The worst of it, however, is the voices. For there are others outside the maze, too, travelling along its outer edge. I hear them clear as day; they are nonresponsive to my calls. By the familiarity of their voices, I know that several travel north—or in whichever direction the maze drives me—at approximately the same pace... though at substantially greater leisure, neither having to navigate this labyrinth nor scrape through its thickets. No, their journey is a great journey: one of freshly dewed paddocks, of pines, of yew, of streams that one may always hop over and land firmly. Theirs is a land without walls. Theirs is a land not mine.
    Were I to meet these others, what shall I say? Not, surely, that I ought to be freed. I have run this maze too long now for that—been closed in on too many times to ever believe it will never reoccur. Yes, this tomb is mine forever. This much I know.
    But perhaps they would tell others of me. That, I could be satisfied with. For them to say to others—look how we have run free, enjoyed life, travelled where we pleased, all while this chap has run his maze. Look what a maze he has been given. Look how he has run it well. How he has battered through, time and time again, obstacles we did not even dream of. In the dark. In the light. We have it good, don’t we? Compared to this fellow?
    Yes, they’d agree. We have it good. 
    That, I could be satisfied with.