Walk like a snowman

I was walking home from the gym – after a nice hour of sauna if you’re curious – listening to music – Bruce Springsteen, and The Promise, if you really want to know – and had just walked through the underpass when I saw something that made me stop: two sets of footprints in the snow.

Who?

To my left, a path, with a few different kinds of footprints, and the tracks of a baby stroller on each side. And then, in front of me, in the thick pile of snow that had snowed in just a few hours during the day, a lone set of bootprints.

They were pretty close to each other, which was understandable because it was still snowing, so the person had had to struggle to walk, but why had he chosen to plough through the snow where no-one else had walked, instead of using the path that others had made?

Did he not notice the path because it was snowing so much that he had to close his eyes for long periods of time? Or, did he choose to walk through the snow?

Maybe he had got a new pair of Camel boots and wanted to see if they really worked, and were made for adventurers like the ads suggest. Maybe he pretended that he was traveling through space in a speed of light, and that the snow flakes that were coming at him were like the beams of light that stars make when Chewbacca takes Millennium Falcon up to warp speed. Or maybe he was distracted by something, maybe he saw a man carrying a rolled up carpet with two feet sticking out of it.

Or maybe, just maybe, he got a flashback of when he was walking to school 35 years earlier, and it was raining really hard, and he felt the rain on his face, as he leaned forward even more when he passed the bus stop and he thought that people were watching. Maybe he remembered how he, then, had been pretending that he was a, no, not a superhero, but a real prince, not letting anything – anything you hear! – come between him and his task, which was to save the world.

Just a thought.

I looked at the footprints again, turned around, and walked home.

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