Note: See Beautifully Broken main page for previous instalments (1-7)
With my young companion Barber, I felt buoyed up. We had escaped the tribal warfare and he had an audio tape that allowed me to use my unique navigation method to progress through the confounding twists and turns of the labyrinth. He was as driven as I was to find our way to the mountain at the heart of the labyrinth and find a way to escape. He was running from his past, a past of warfare and endless aggression, towards a bright future, a peaceful existence. But what was it that I was running towards? I had always had the urge to escape but to what end? Barber wanted to cut hair, to offer a service to people, but why had I started out again? Was it just for the sake of it? Had I been in the labyrinth for so long that I’d forgotten what I ever planned to do when I escaped? How unusual. I couldn’t remember why I wanted to escape, I couldn’t even remember if I had ever wanted to escape for a reason other than escape itself. Was that my life? Just a constant running away? Never a running towards?
This realization about my mental state coincided with the arrival of a front of bad weather. I’d never experienced anything like it before in my time in the labyrinth and Barber said the same. Pelting rain and hail. Barber pulled his military jacket marked with blue stripes over his head for cover and I used my dusty brown leather taxi driver’s jacket that I’d picked up in a charity shop a long time ago in some part of the labyrinth. The hail and stinging rain went on like that for more than three days and my only consolation was that because it was a new experience and the turns and straights were unfamiliar we were making progress and had entered an entirely new part of the labyrinth. The cassette of Starship’s album No Protection didn’t like the weather much either and the sound started to warp. I pulled the tape out only to see that the small sponge that pressed the tape up into the tape head had disintegrated, meaning the tape couldn’t feed properly. It was useless and once again we were lost and caught up in suffering.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Beautifully Broken to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.