Traveler

Always moving, never arriving. The speaker has slept in a hundred borrowed beds, opened many windows and felt the same in each, and knows every airport and the sound a door makes when someone leaves too soon. Asked where he is from, he says wherever he is standing. Each map he folds leaves a crease across his hand. The road never asked him to stay, which is the only reason he never walks away from it. Distance is home, and every city takes a piece and lets him go. He says he does not leave to escape the pain but out of fear of what would happen if he stayed. Then a quieter verse: a woman in a city he will not let himself recall, a table set for someone who never came home. Freedom, he admits, starts to look like fear when you have been gone this long. Maybe the road was only keeping him from arriving, and the hardest journey is the one that ends at a door he finally opens.