Choose

September 19, 2008

Choose by Kari Breed

She stood in the center of the room not knowing which way to go. The voice on the loudspeaker shouted over and over, “Go! Go! Go!” but she didn’t know. She didn’t know which way to go, so she stood there. She looked angrily around for someone who could tell her the way, but there was no one. So she stood there. Eventually the day faded away, and the voice on the loudspeaker gave up its unrelenting chant. Everything was quiet, which she thought, at first, would be a good thing. It wasn’t.

It wasn’t any better because now the voice that was once outside of herself was now in her head. Go. Go. Go. But she still didn’t know. She could make a move toward the door - any door - but which one? How would she choose? How would she know ahead of time which one was the right one to go to? She sat down on the floor to contemplate this and found, much to her dismay, that the only answer that came to her was that night turns into day.

For awhile she thought that this might be a good thing. Maybe by the light of day she would know. But as the morning light was burned away by the sun, she saw very clearly that she still saw nothing at all. She still didn’t know.

So she sat there awhile longer.

Contemplating.

Her anger turned into boredom, and her boredom became apathy, and pretty soon she couldn’t get up off the floor. The voice inside her head gave way to silence, and still she did not know. She looked around at the various possibilities, but still she did not know.

“Choose,” she heard, but did not trust the voice. “Pick something,” it said in her head, but it did not tell her what. All the options looked the same. Dark, mysterious, unsafe. Like places you’d only go if you had to go, but she didn’t have to go. There was time. She could wait. Nothing would happen to her so long as she stayed where she was.

That was a lie, because time happened. It changed and bent and burned its way through day after day, and if she’d had a mirror, she would have known she was getting old. Things had changed. Everything had changed but her. And even though she had never left, she had somehow been left behind.

This awakened in her a new urgency to go go go. But still she did not know where. She didn’t know if she could. Her eyes and her mind and her legs had grown stiff and encumbered by the weight of themselves. She no longer remembered how to run. But by now she had grown curious. Which was the right way to go? Finally she stood. And finally she walked. And finally she chose a door and opened it out into a hallway that connected all of the other doors together.

Posted in Goals