Jorge said that once you see the city, it will be like you are a new person entirely. He said that you will forget about your old life and you will walk towards it, take off your gear, and just keep on walking until you’re standing under the sign that declares the city limits, and that’ll be it. Totally different person, totally clean slate.

Pshaw, we said. Horse Puckey, we scoffed. Poppy-cock, we laughed, raising our glasses in blissful ignorance. Another round on him! we yelled at the top of our lungs. Jorge cracked a grin like he’d been playing us all along and man did we have some good times. But something about the story caught our attention; Piqued our interest, you could say. We asked if he could take us there in exchange for all of us paying for all the Snickers bars he could stuff into his pockets and he agreed, vehemently. The next morning, we set out, gear strapped on and everything, right down to the specialized booties for every environment of which one could conceive. Jorge said it wasn’t far but hey, boy-scouts and everything. Always be prepared, even for things that probably won’t ever happen. We told Jackie that we didn’t need the industrial-grade space heater, but she wouldn’t listen. Girls. I’m rolling my eyes here.

So away we went, out into the un-tamed countryside, heading off to the mountains looming in the distance. We asked Jorge why don’t we just take the jeep in to the foot-hills at least but he’s all Silence! You know how it is. So we fall back, pull out some energy bars, Jim starts us off in a rousing rendition of Frere Jacque and it’s good times, good times.

We walk for days. We eventually get sick and tired of lugging around the fifty plus pounds of extra junk we got hanging off our backs, so we shed the mostly useless stuff. First to go is the extra changes of clothes, then the paper plates, then Bob says “Enough is enough!” and leaves the baccarat table in someone’s driveway. Finally we give up the tents because the weather is just beautiful, so we’re sleeping on the ground anyway.

We’re tired, but excited. We spend our days walking in silence, and at night we lie on our backs looking up at the stars. We’re all wide awake and we know that everyone else is awake, but we don’t make a sound. We just lay there and get lost in the dimly-lit skies. The ground under our backs is warm, and the crickets and peepers serenade us oh so beautifully. The Milky Way rolls overhead like a hula-hoop, and we cry ourselves to sleep from it all.

On day twenty-six, we begin to wonder. The mountains are no closer, and it seems like we’re making little if any progress. We start to ask ourselves if we’ll ever see the wondrous city for which we gave up everything.

In order to keep our spirits up, we take turns making up stories about how it will be in the city where people can be new. Where people don’t have to deal with their old neuroses and problems and issues and memories. We just want to forget. Forget the days spent indoors doing tasks that are wholly unimportant, forget the many botched relationships, forget the dreams we had but didn’t chase, forget the many mistakes we should not have made.

I finally ask Jorge about it, specifically how much farther it is, and he says “Not terribly far.” Then I ask him how we’ll know we’re there, because once we get there, we’ll forget this entire journey and our reasons why we travelled to the city in the first place. In fact, we could already have been to the city and forgotten our old lives and wouldn’t even known it. What if we’ve already been to the city a thousand times before and can never remember being there because we are constantly sloughing off our old lives like so many layers of clothing?

Jorge thought that was just so funny. He laughed for a good long time.