Two paths, one fool

Two crooked paths slithered apart in a jaundiced forest—yellowed leaves, bile-soaked wood— and damn me, cursed with just one soul, I couldn’t split in two, couldn’t slip like mercury down both veins, couldn’t dance the split-legged jig of indecision. So there I was, frozen, stuck like a nail in the eye of the universe, gazing down one road until it twisted away, swallowed by the snarling, tangled undergrowth of this fractured mindscape.

Then—madness or clarity—who can tell in such moments of existential vertigo?—I leapt, feet first, into the other, the road less worn, less beaten down by the hammers of a thousand weary feet. It was a ragged, wild thing, grassy, begging for footsteps, a virgin path in a world too eager to crush innocence beneath the heel. But—ha!—isn’t it always the same? Footprints overlap, memory blurs, and soon enough, that too would be a well-trodden way.

The morning wore both paths like an indifferent lover’s cloak, untouched by the ruin of choice, untouched by man’s need to carve stories into earth’s flesh. Leaves cradled the ground, waiting to be trampled, waiting for fate to play its cruel hand. Oh, but I, fool of fools, held back, kept one path in the dusty chamber of ‘later,’ a promise to myself wrapped in the rustling silence of inevitability.

But who am I kidding? I knew, I "knew" that once you start down one road, the other slips away, a whisper of what could have been, lost in the swirling eddies of time. Paths don’t wait, they don’t circle back. No, they coil forward, devouring themselves in the endless now.

And so, I’ll whisper this to the wind in some distant future, a sigh that echoes through the ages: Two roads forked, twisted, danced in that sickly wood, and I—madman, dreamer, drifter—I chose the one less beaten, less scarred by the march of men. And it, oh yes, it has made all the difference… or has it?

FSF