All travel is just beyond the edge

When we were young, we would explore the edges of our suburban sprawl.  We would take our bikes through neighborhoods passed gas stations and soccer fields and gargantuan power lines pumping a modern lifestyle into thousands of mcmansions, lined up like fractals from the sky.  We would ride as far as our fears would allow, conjuring myths about abandoned houses and devil worshipers, about high schoolers and coyotes.  We would push into seemingly fantastic realms, into fields untouched by development, where the fractals did not reach.  We would explore the edges, because the edges were there.



When we turned 16, cars shrank every distance.  The edge of the neighborhood no longer bordered an exciting unknown world.  The mythology we created began to fade.  We climbed in cars and took the roads of our youth until their end, collapsing our mystical world into reality.  We would inventory how far each road reached, and when we found an edge, we would remember the past.  We could not build new roads, but the new roads were coming.  Eventually, the curious space beyond the edges met other edges from other childhoods.  And the edge began to disappear.

Now, we push out for new unknowns, traveling as far as our curiosity will allow.  We stop in Florence, in Bali, in Cairo, in Nepal, and realize that the edge is still there, always just a few feet in front of us.  And again, that feeling returns.  A door is never just a door.  A room never just a room.  That free-fall off of the edge of our own world is where we find it.  We explore the edges, because the edges are there.