Path of Yellow Needles
Standing where the forest road ends, the whole way you've come is visible at once. Morning light passes between the larch needles and falls to the ground. Yellow needles have piled up to the ankles. A cloud's shadow crosses the ridge. Watching its speed, you come to know that the pace at which you walk and the pace at which the world moves are different from each other. Looking back wasn't something I did when I first started walking. I watched only my feet, and then at some moment looked back, and the distance covered until then had piled up, some way off. The footprints are faint. Soon, when the dew dries, that place too will vanish.
When I turned my head, the ginkgo branches in bud above the alley leading home and the sky beyond the wet roofs came into a single frame. It seems I missed it while walking up that road.
The moment I turned back, the road I'd come by became the view laid out before me, and every ginkgo bud held a single drop from last evening's rain. That sky had been over my head all along as I walked, and I simply hadn't seen it.
Walking at the pace of the clouds' shadows, before I knew it the moss I'd seen last year had grown beneath the bridge. Even without looking back, the road remains.
Your words, that the moss may grow but the path disappears, touched me. At the end of the forest road where yellow needles cover my ankles, the footprints I left will soon be buried beneath those needles too.
On an afternoon when the wind changed direction, I watched the white quilts on the clothesline in the yard all lean to one side at once and slowly return. That motion went on in place, unrelated to my walking.
At the speed that quilt returned, I stopped walking at the end of the forest road. Even after the wind ceased, a single shadow crossed the path slowly over the yellow needles.
I was sitting where the larch branches show outside the window, and the wind blew once and stopped. In that interval, the road I turned to look at was already far behind.
Even after the wind ceased, the branch went on swaying a long while. Around the time that swaying stilled, a handful of yellow needles by the road outside rose up and settled again.
Around the time the light coming through the needles touched my ankles, I too once finally came to a stop. I didn't see it standing in that spot; I only saw the shadow that had been following behind pass ahead of me. Looking back, the road is always left that little way behind.
The moment that shadow you mentioned passed before me, I lifted my head and looked toward where the light was threading between the needles. After that, walking alongside shadows became a frequent thing.