I pause briefly to adjust the roughly fashioned cloth straps from digging further into my shoulders. I relax my muscles and glance back at my load. All I have is this cart. Over the years it has grown from being a child's plaything to something that really should be pulled by some horses.
Here I am though, apparently in a horseless universe. Using the clothes from each period past as rope and strap to keep pulling.
No idea where I am going, the world around me is a wasteland, and each world before it is now just a fragment. These fragments I drag along, unable to leave them and unable to push them.
Yeah, I could push the cart, but that is not what I mean.
These fragments are like windows cut from water, emanating light from the outside. I have tried standing on the side of the cart to see glimpses but only see my own discontent. I have tried lifting a piece only to have it escape my grasp like the wind.
I think it is because they are not really there. These shards in my cart.
Regardless, I prepare myself and feel the weight hit my shoulders. I will keep dragging them along. I know no other way. I have asked myself how do I know they are a window to another side. Just now I did; again.
I am sure I have many times before, it is the same as how I know that this rope and harness are from clothes I have worn in a different life, a different time. A different mind.
These are my thoughts, and those shards are the pieces that represent every moment from all the other moments. I do not remember them all but I do know them all.
At the end of each day I will fail, my legs will buckle and my shoulders scream for release. Tomorrow I may wake up and let the cart remain stagnant, keep my head down and do what is expected; do what gets me to the end.
The next day I will wake up and possibly this landscape will have changed. Flowing grass down to a stream, rejuvenating if only to the eye. Because this is all just in my mind, and on my shoulders in contrast to the serpent green grass, and deep blue void of the stream; grime from my makeshift straps mark the weight of all that is unresolved.