I was walking in the street, right on the white line that
marks the middle of the road. On my back, I wore a huge bag,
the kind of bag you take when you travel. Inside the bag, I
kept food, water, a sleeping bag, some clothes, and first
aid suitcase. When watching me, the drivers' faces wore the
kind of expression you wear when looking at those poor
people who walk in zigzags with an empty bottle not made of
plastic in their hands. But I didn't walk in zigzags. I
walked straight.

It appeared so strange to others. As if it took supernatural
powers to walk forward, between the cars, and keep moving in
a straight line. It was dangerous, yes, but not difficult. I
began to almost hear peoples' thoughts when they walked by,
on the pavement. I never claimed I was a mind reader.
However, when you're walking on the white line of the road,
heading straight, realizing what people think about you is
not that much of a mission. It was written on their
foreheads: 'why? Why is this man doing this? He must be
crazy'  

I noticed people didn't like unexplained things. That must
be the reason they gave the simplest explanations to
anything that seems a little more complex to them then
eating, drinking or shitting. It wasn't their fault though,
humans' eyesight is two dimensional. How could they perceive
depth?

'DAMN! Fucking son of a bitch! Drivers aren't supposed to
cross that line, you fat FUCK! Who the FUCK was the idiot
who gave YOU license! Motherfucker.' Damn, this motherfucker
almost run me over. Couldn't this fuck see a man crossing
the cross? I had to stop and drink some water. Damn, I could
hear my heart beating. From all the lines in the road, I
though the white line would be the safest place to walk
along. I was wrong. I kept walking though.  

Every once in a while I stopped, sat on the white line that
marks the end of the road, and drank some water. I walked
through town, and kept on. There were much less vehicles on
the freeway. Watching the open fields surrounding the road
would give one the illusion of freedom. People sometimes
have these fantasies of running naked in the fields. But not
me. I'm a reasonable person.

Nearing another cross in the road, I noticed a man walking
on the pavement. He was walking towards me, holding a to go
cup of coffee in his hand.

"I know it may seem rude, catching you like this, in the
middle of the road, but may I ask where are you going?"

I pointed my hand to the direction: 'straight'.

"You know, it's funny I should catch you walking like this,
because I also walk straight".

"You are?" His 'straight' was my left as he came from the
right. I waited for him to resume his walking.

"Yes. I decided to take me a walk, and see where will I get
to if I simply walk straight."

"Oh, lovely". Another idiot.

"I've met some people who walk right before, also met a
person who walked only left. But you're the first guy I see
walking straight."

"Well, I'm honored." The other 'straight-walking' man was
nice. However, I didn't like being disturbed.

The man pointed at the direction where he came from.
"There's a lovely stop there. They make real good coffee
real cheap"

I looked to my right. There was a stop there. It was called
'Real Good Coffee Real Cheap'. "But I though you were
walking straight" People. Sometimes I just don't understand
you. You say you walk straight when all you really do is
walk forward.

"Well, you have to make a stop once in a while, and go right
or left. I mean, they have great coffee there"

"I'm o.k." I showed on the impressive bag I was carrying.
The other man finally crossed the road to the left and moved
on.

As I kept walking, I heard a fly whispering.

"It had only occurred to me, you're walking in the middle of
the road, that could be quite dangerous, man"

I ignored that fly.

It's funny, when you walk on a straight road for long
enough, you begin to look at things differently. The two
straight lines that mark the confines of the gray road begin
to actually meet together and part simultaneously. As I kept
going forward, I imagined I'm nearing the point where these
lines meet. Naturally, I KNEW two parallel straight lines
never meet. But it was nice to imagine that this journey had
actually had a destination.

Another thing that happens when you walk on a straight road
for long enough, is that you begin to wonder how long are
you actually walking, and how long is left to walk. I was
wearing a watch, of course, but I didn't measure time. I
didn't really bother to look at the watch when I left the
city. However, I've imagined I'm walking for about two hours
or so.

Was it this morning? Damn, it seemed like long ago. Maybe it
WAS long ago? Like reality, time does not really exist. It's
only perception that matters. My legs weren't the legs that
carried me when I left home, earlier this morning. They were
the same legs of course, flesh-and blood wise. But they
didn't FEEL the same. They began to feel like an old lady's
legs. An old lady who suffers from osteoporosis, that is. To
be quite frank, with every step I took walking began to be
quite of a serious mission. I made a lot of stops. I had to
relieve and massage my feet every once in a while. A car
drove by every once in a while. None of them stopped for me.
They were afraid. I was glad that they were afraid.

In theory, straight lines last forever. That's what I like
about them. 'For how longer?' A part of me whished for the
road to last, while the other whished for it to end so that
the view of the straight line would change. I was putting
the rule of infiniteness in the test of reality. This was
the reality of solid ground, sand, roads, trees, hills,
valleys, buildings, people, animals, and cars. Could a
straight line be infinite in this world? A part of me wished
it could. The other part, knew that if it were, I wouldn't
live long enough to watch it. There was no way I could prove
straight lines don't last forever on Earth by not living to
see the end of the line. On the other hand, if I were to
watch the end of the line, it would not be a mathematical
proof either. However, the kind of proof I was seeking was
not mathematical but practical.

In this practical set of rules, nothing lasts forever.
Somehow, the line has to end somewhere. 'But how? What will
I do when the road ends? What will I do when there's no more
going forward? Will I simply go back home and back to my
life routine? Wake up, walk the dog, go to study, go to
work?' That didn't sound too thrilling. This journey could
not be in vain. Life couldn't simply go on in their twisted
path after going straight for so long. As anxious as I was
to reach my unknown destination, I didn't really want this
journey to end.

Only less then a few meters away from the cross, did I begin
to believe what my eyes showed and my mind interpreted. I
reached a T cross. I looked right, looked left. And went
straight, into the sand. That's right. You cannot imagine
how easy it is to simply walk straight sometimes.

Waking up in nature is unlike waking up at home. They say
you have to have a very good reason in order to wake up
without wanting to murder someone for getting you out of
bed. When you wake up at home, you wake up because you have
to: you have to work, you have to study, you have to walk
the dog. When you wake up in nature is because you want to:
you want to see the sunrise, you want to move on, you want
to reach your destination in this journey. You are tired,
but you want to, so you have no one to blame. The power of
will is stronger then the power of needs.

After I spent the night at the valley, I woke up to the
sight of a rather tall hill. Just to the sight of it, my
legs began to really hurt. But I got up, brushed my teeth,
and spit the fresh paste out of my mouth. Step by step, I
climbed.

It's funny how a certain length of a line can become so much
shorter or longer, depending on the incline. Measured by
meters, there's no change. However, measured by power, by
feeling, by the time and energy it takes to walk the length
of the line, the difference is immense. Imagining I was
walking on level ground, I kept going.

From the hill, you could see the whole valley. I sat on the
hot sand with legs crossed and drank my water. My legs were
begging for air. They were hurt from the corns. I took off
my shoes, laid my back on the warm sand, and fell asleep
again.

My mouth was dry when I woke up. I grabbed the bottle and
brought it to my mouth. There were a few drops of water
there, not enough to saturate my thirst. I reached for
another bottle, then another, then another. But they were
all empty. I needed to find water. I knew where to search.

I swallowed my saliva over and over again. It felt like my
body was hollowed. My bones and muscles were hurt from the
effort. I moved slowly forward, in a straight line. Each leg
pulled to a different direction. But I gathered myself up
and went on.

'Why am I doing this? Why straight? What the hell was going
through my mind when I made that decision?' I made the sorry
mistake of attempting to think with a dry mind. Without
water, and power, there is no clear thought. You must
understand that before I describe what I did next.

Nothing seemed important at that moment. Keep moving,
stopping, going right, going left, all of the above were
pointless. 'What if I go back now? This road doesn't lead
anywhere. It's not even a road. Not even a path. How could
it be the way?'

I'm not proud of what I did then. But in the sand, lacking
water to drink, the blood lacking oxygen to deliver to the
brain, even if you're not crazy, you begin to do crazy
things.

I ran. I ran like a mad man. I ran right, then left, then in
circles, then in an eight shape. Now that must have been
quite of a sight. If you've never seen a powerless man
driving the insides out of his body in a last effort to run,
to get away, to BE away from something that you cannot
define, you've never seen a mad man. I was yelling. I looked
down to the sand once, then right up to the sky. I closed my
eyes and opened them while still running. I was falling,
then crawling, then lying on the hot sand as though I were
dead.

The white sand turned brown, and then black.

Cold, fresh fluid streamed through my body. It washed my
face. I opened my eyes and saw tiny little blue waves.
Water. The air in my mouth screamed for something my hands
couldn't fetch - water. I reached my hand forward, touching
the soft, small curves of the water.

'Get up, get up!' But I couldn't bring myself to do. My body
felt hard as a corpse. My head was like a huge weight, which
my neck muscles couldn't carry. I was as good as dead. But I
chose life. I had to keep going. I couldn't just give into
it because nature told me to. Giving up had never been my
nature.

I reached my hand farther into the water. I waited for
another small wave. When it finally came, I brought my hand
to my mouth, licking the water and sand off my fingers. It
didn't fill my mouth in water. It had filled it with sand.
Sand or water, that trick helped. Slowly, I suck the water
of my wet fingers, reaching out for more, until I got
stronger. The fluid filled my body slowly, giving me the
physical strength I needed to lift myself off the ground and
crawl into the river.

I didn't know where I came from. I didn't know what happened
to my bag. But I kept walking, into the river, on the top of
the hill, setting a new start point, and moving on from
there. I was swimming. The sand burned my eyes. The water
was cold but refreshing. I didn't know exactly where was I
heading to, but I swam straight.

I grabbed one empty bottle of water and filled it with the
water of the river. The stream was weak. It was not a deep
river so I could almost walk through it till the other river
bank.

My clothes were heavy from the water. I couldn't carry their
weight. I took them off. I took my shoes off too. Barefoot,
walking was almost easier. It was still early, so the sand
was cold. I didn't worry about what will be of me next. I
left my clothes there, by the river bank. And kept on
walking. Not forward, but straight.

A deer came from nowhere, stared at my bare manhood and
disappeared into thin air. Yes, I left my underwear too by
the river. I was in the middle of nowhere, damn it!

The Arab kids who grew up in the desert wouldn't understand
me if I describe my feelings to them. Their feet were as
used to the warm sand as mine to sneakers.

If you put your finger in a glass filled with hot water for
a couple of moments, the finger would get used to the heat.
However, if the water in the glass are really hot, the more
you keep your finger in it, the more you harm yourself. What
can I say, walking barefoot in a mid day hour, that sand was
really hot. I began to walk on my toes, intensifying my
pace.

This became the most difficult part of the journey. My feet
were burning, but I had to ignore them in order to move on.
I wasn't used to ignoring pain. In my bag, I had
painkillers. But my bag was left by the river. And this was
not the sort of pain a pill would help to relieve. I got
tired quickly though. I had to find a piece of cloth,
another river, something to walk on. There was nothing in
sight. Absolutely nothing in sight.

Then, I realized there WAS nothing in sight. After taking a
dozen steps forward, I reached the place to where all the
rivers flow.

The sea was so near, yet miles away, beneath the cliff my
feet were stepping on. There were dark rocks down there.
Then, the brown sand of the shore. Then, the blue water of
the sea.

Is this the end of my journey? Can I go back home now, naked
as the day I was born? The sand was burning my feet. There
was no point in turning right or left. There was no going
back from the point that I've finally reached. This was the
endless point where two parallel straight lines meet. I
smiled, wand walked straight.