This road helps me run from the harsh thoughts streaming through my mind. This road helps me forget, helps me run. My blood knots me to the plains. This land knows that. It doesn’t like that I am here. These coasts reject me, remind me that I do not belong. This road makes me forget all of that. In the evening hours, my mind plays its tricks, forcing me to focus on surviving the walk and nothing else. Shadows of branches reach out and cloak the road in the void of night. A fear tugs at my tendons, my muscles try and jump from my skin, but I march forever onward. 
At a point, waves crash on my left, while an eerily open field expands to my right. Far enough and water borders both my sides. Water: a place I so deeply care for yet fear. A cruel yet beautiful mistress, full of life and gifts and so willing to tear it all away. As I walk an unknown terror pricks my mind. Stained trails of motor oil seem to be more sinister as they lead into yet another shadow. My mind spins tales of a deer carcass in my path, convincing me I’ll trip over and into its warm and rotting viscera. I stumble over nothing in the lightless shadow. I cannot even trust my own feet in the realm of the dark. Covered trees haunt my peripherals with human silhouettes.
Does my God protect me on this lonely road? Like the martyrs of countless stories of His devout dying in His name? Do I get the same protection as detailed in His book? Does something watch from beyond the dark, does it see me? Did this unknown make the stains and trails that accent the road? Did it blot out the light so that it could get ever closer? My breaths grow shallow, and my pace hastens. Is it here, does it watch? It bides its time. It has yet to reveal itself, but it will one day. Will I be ready? Will I be able to stop it? My throat desperate to scream gets no satisfaction. My eyes scan the puddles of dark that break the road, darting to every possible hiding place. I see nothing. 
The cold, once unnoticed, bites my skin and slows my bones. Everything in me tells me to run. But where do I run? Do I run further down this accursed peninsula, or back to a warm place where the plague of my mind festers? I know not where to run, so I march ever on. I walk this road alone, alone with the love I harbor for the ones so dear. Do I return where my mind festers in its own poison, or do I stay where it’s lost itself, only focused on surviving. 
A wall of dark larger and denser than the others blocks my path. My nerves get the better of me and I turn back. Every ounce of my body wants to run. My muscles yearn for it yet cannot oblige. I track back to the world of warmth and light. Warm enough for a plague to spread. I only hope that of all the things this cold, dark road wants to take, that it takes the thoughts that drove me here. 
