Personal Narrative: A Walk On The Road

I often think of Robert Frost’s phrase, “I took the road less traveled by” when brushing against dirt, rocks, or grass on a trail. While following a single stretch of a path, whether that road leads in a curve or in a straight line, I notice a myriad of branches to trails that I normally classify as detours. Is that what Robert Frost means when he says he traveled a road less traveled by others?
The grass stops splashing my shoes with its dew as I realize I’ve switched paths. I’m on gravel now, walking the road traveled by most as I regain my bearings. Various others have walked these gravel streets before, though I doubt that they weren’t just thinking of transit; the transit from class to home, work to home, party to home, or home to home.
Gravel reminds me of city streets, lit up twenty-four hours a day and providing plenty of reason to hustle through the daily traffic jam. Specifically, I remember clearly how eons would pass by in cars, buses, or trains waiting to get home as the city became larger and longer. Strips of

restaurants, bars, stores, apartments, and beaches would pass by in the window while I put on headphones and succumbed to music in the back seat. When I was younger in commutes, I would conceptualize that the people outside were all heading to the same party place and that it must be the same place my parents go when they dress up.
The street is hard against my stiff feet as I glance across unfinished gum on the sidewalk and an abandoned newspaper. I’m not sure what to think of people that litter: on one hand they could just throw their trash into trash bin, but on the other there are some people that get busy and resolve to short-term solutions. It doesn’t meddle with my steady pace, but I begin to hyper analyze everything around me from the trees supplanted into the concrete to the strippers by the school bus stop. I wonder how many paths really converge on a daily basis, since there are multitudes of people on public transportation that I might see every day but never talk to. Is that the proper way to treat people on the same relative path as you?
Whenever I leave cities I’m always greeted by another one, each with unique roads, streets, and transportation, but I hardly ever say hello to strangers.

“Don’t talk to strangers,” my parents would tell me in unison. Ironically, as I would traverse familiar party-blocks, strangers would come up to me and ask for directions so I would do my best if I could to help. To this day, I’m not sure if there really is a “stranger danger” that is universal to all creeds, though I tend to think people on the same path ought to be respected to a certain extent.
Apple trees have been dropping their babies from the sky, hurling them towards the ground in hopes that they will grow new trees. Unfortunately, as I trudge through their corpses on the gravel road, I have seen this to be a vain hope of nature that cannot adapt to human expansion. There are tracks, however, in these apple stained roads and perhaps humans will expand that throughout the

path.