Chapter 12 — The Last Wander
And thus begins Chapter Twelve.
The Last Day.
Now, children.
I awoke early.
Very early.
The council immediately becomes suspicious.
Not because of discipline.
Not because I had suddenly become the sort of traveler who wakes before sunrise to greet the morning with gratitude.
No.
There was a package.
The council leans forward.
The package.
The tiny mystery the bald Tibetan woman from the Secret Cafe had handed me days ago.
One instruction.
Open it on your last day.
Children.
It was finally my last day.
And apparently curiosity possesses a remarkably effective alarm clock.
I sat up.
Reached for the packet.
Held it for a moment.
The council gathers close.
Days of waiting.
Days of wondering.
Perhaps some spiritual object.
Perhaps a charm.
Perhaps a message.
Perhaps something symbolic.
I opened it.
The council waits.
Mushrooms.
The council pauses.
A lot of mushrooms.
Approximately a dozen and a half of the little bastards staring back at me.
The council erupts.
Ah.
Of course.
Children.
Apparently the mysterious Tibetan woman had prepared a psychedelic finale.
A perfectly reasonable conclusion to this entire week.
Then I noticed something else.
A note.
Small.
Simple.
I unfolded it.
The council grows quiet.
Two lines.
That was all.
“Let it go.
Let it all go.”
The council says nothing.
Children.
I stared at those words.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
No explanation.
No philosophy.
No grand spiritual thesis.
No twenty seven step guide to enlightenment.
Just an instruction.
The sort of instruction that sounds beautifully simple until you possess something you have been carrying for years.
The weight.
The ache.
The things I replayed.
The things I couldn’t change.
The rooms inside my head I kept returning to even though nothing new ever waited there.
Let it go.
The council listens.
Naturally,
I had questions.
How?
Which part?
For how long?
Do you have accompanying documentation?
The note provided no customer support.
The council nods.
Typical mysticism.
So I looked at the mushrooms.
Then at the note.
Then back at the mushrooms.
Children.
You already know what happened.
I ate them.
All of them.
The council collapses.
Of course you did.
No ceremony.
No careful ritual.
Just:
chomp.
The council watches in horror.
Children.
The Unbegun has never been accused of respecting serving suggestions.
Now.
I had one final thing I wanted to do.
Not a destination.
Not an attraction.
Not some famous place I had somehow missed.
I wanted to wander.
One last time.
But differently.
The council leans forward.
For the past week,
I had chosen roads because I didn’t know where they went.
Today,
I chose them because I did.
The council grows quiet.
I retraced the wandering.
The steep roads.
The market.
The chai stalls.
The little shops.
The corners that had once been completely unfamiliar and now felt strangely mine.
Everywhere I had drifted.
Everywhere someone had spoken to me.
Helped me.
Fed me.
Laughed with me.
Tolerated my catastrophic Hindi.
Children.
I went back.
Not to buy anything.
Not to ask anything.
Just to say thank you.
The council smiles.
And so began the final pilgrimage.
Not toward somewhere new.
Back through everywhere I had already been.
The mushrooms arrived gently.
That surprised me.
I knew mushrooms as chaos.
Colors misbehaving.
Reality becoming liquid.
Thoughts multiplying faster than I could hold them.
Children.
This wasn’t that.
This was calm.
Not calm as the absence of noise.
Calm as a presence.
Something soft settling over everything.
The council listens.
Colors became richer.
The streets brighter.
Faces warmer.
The trees looked impossibly alive.
Even ordinary walls seemed to possess some ridiculous amount of beauty they had apparently been hiding from me all week.
But nothing screamed.
Nothing overwhelmed.
Nothing demanded.
Everything simply
was.
And I loved all of it.
The council grows quiet.
Affection seemed to leak out of me.
For everyone.
Shopkeepers.
Dogs.
Strangers.
The man selling tea.
The woman arranging things outside her store.
Some random cow occupying a significant percentage of a road.
Children.
Especially the cow.
The council approves.
I stopped wherever I recognized someone.
Some recognized me immediately.
Some needed a moment.
Some probably had absolutely no idea who I was and politely accepted the gratitude of a brightly dressed cryptid anyway.
I thanked them.
For what?
Anything.
Everything.
For helping.
For talking.
For directions.
For tea.
For food.
For a chair.
For fixing my bracelet.
For remembering me when I had forgotten myself.
The council listens.
Sometimes language worked.
Sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I managed actual sentences.
Sometimes all I could offer was:
Thank you.
Smile.
Hands together.
Goodbye.
And somehow,
it was enough.
Children.
Goodbyes do not always require eloquence.
Sometimes they only require sincerity.
I found the chai stall.
The grandmother.
The council smiles.
I showed her the bracelet.
Still intact.
Kasol.
Rishikesh.
Hanging together because she had taken pity on an idiot fighting a piece of string.
I thanked her again.
Probably far more enthusiastically than the situation required.
She laughed.
I laughed.
And eventually,
I moved on.
Because there were more roads.
More people.
More little pieces of the wandering waiting for one final visit.
The council watches.
Hours passed.
Slowly.
Beautifully.
The market unfolded around me.
The bridge appeared again.
Dogs received ceremonial scratches.
Of course.
Children.
There are traditions.
The Ganga appeared between buildings.
The same river I had somehow encountered over and over again.
Different banks.
Different days.
Different states of consciousness.
And this time,
I understood something.
Or perhaps believed I understood something.
The council leans forward.
Rishikesh had not made the weight disappear.
Not suddenly.
There was no single moment.
No magic sentence.
No miraculous cure.
It had been smaller than that.
A little piece at a time.
The dog waiting for me while I caught my breath.
The bungee platform.
The river.
The prayer.
The Secret Cafe.
The woman asking:
“What are your worries?”
The grandmother tying my relics together.
The forgotten food stall.
The impossible vision of Bongo and Dyno.
Two dogs beside the Ganga.
Stillness.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The council grows quiet.
All week,
Rishikesh had been teaching me the same thing in different languages.
Stop gripping.
Stop fighting every second.
Stop trying to force the ache into submission.
Let something simply be what it is.
Let the river move.
Let strangers leave.
Let memories hurt.
Let roads end.
Let yourself sit down.
Let yourself cry.
Let yourself breathe.
Let it go.
The council looks toward the note.
Children.
Suddenly,
I understood why she had told me to wait.
Had I opened that packet the first day,
those words would have meant nothing.
Pretty.
Spiritual.
The sort of sentence someone prints onto wall art.
But now?
After a week of slowly loosening my hands from everything I had been clutching?
Now I could feel it.
The note wasn’t the lesson.
The week had been the lesson.
The note merely named it.
The council falls silent.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
Not forget.
Not stop caring.
Not pretend it never mattered.
Just stop carrying everything like dropping it would mean betraying the person you were when you picked it up.
Children.
Some things deserve to be remembered without being dragged behind you forever.
And perhaps,
for the first time,
I understood the difference.
The weight in my chest?
Still there.
A little.
The council nods.
I do not believe in endings clean enough to remove every scar.
But gods,
it was lighter.
So much lighter.
And unlike Kasol,
I hadn’t outrun it.
The council listens.
Kasol had been movement.
Go.
Run.
Climb.
Dance.
Fall.
Get lost.
Find people.
Lose people.
Keep moving until sadness forgets where you went.
Rishikesh had done the opposite.
Sit.
Listen.
Watch the river.
Talk to a stranger.
Hold the dog.
Close your eyes.
Cry if you must.
And when the thing finally loosens its grip
let it.
The council smiles.
Movement had saved me once.
Stillness had saved me this time.
Not entirely.
Nothing ever does.
But enough.
Children.
Enough is underrated.
By afternoon,
I found myself back at Odin’s Abode.
Again.
The strange center of every road.
The place a dog had delivered me to days earlier.
The council nods.
I went upstairs.
Collected my bag.
Checked the room.
Checked again.
Because leaving an item behind would require competence from Future Nuo that history did not support.
The Ghost Roommate,
naturally,
was nowhere to be seen.
The council applauds.
A flawless final performance.
I checked out.
Thanked the people there.
Looked around the place one last time.
The rooftop.
The smoking area.
The roads beyond.
The dog who had started all of this.
Children.
It felt strange.
A week ago,
this had been somewhere I accidentally found.
Now I was leaving it like somewhere I had lived.
I stepped outside.
Lit a cigarette.
The council grows quiet.
The last one in Rishikesh.
Not the last cigarette.
Let us not become unrealistic.
The council laughs.
I sat there.
Bag beside me.
Smoke rising.
The city continuing without any concern for my departure.
People walked.
Vehicles screamed.
Dogs wandered.
Somewhere,
the Ganga kept moving.
And for once,
I didn’t feel the urge to record everything.
The council notices.
I simply sat.
Smoked.
And looked.
One last still moment.
No dramatic farewell.
No speech.
No grand revelation.
No mountain answering me from the distance.
Just gratitude.
Children.
I had arrived with a weight in my chest.
I was leaving with a bracelet carrying two wanderings,
a cube from a stranger,
bottles of Ganga water,
too many photographs,
several missing hours,
memories of people whose names I never learned,
and an instruction I suspected I would spend the rest of my life trying to follow.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
The council remains silent.
Eventually,
the cigarette reached the filter.
I put it out.
Stood.
Lifted my bag onto my shoulders.
And looked back at Odin’s Abode.
The wandering was over.
Almost.
Because children,
there remains one cruel truth about every journey.
Eventually,
you have to go home.
Thus concludes Chapter Twelve.
The Package.
The Mushrooms.
The Last Wander.
And The Two Lines That Explained The Entire Week.
Kasol had taught the Unbegun that the cage door could open.
Rishikesh taught him something harder.
You cannot carry the cage with you
and call yourself free.
The council grows quiet.
I had spent years asking how to make the weight disappear.
Perhaps that had always been the wrong question.
Perhaps some weight isn’t meant to vanish.
Perhaps you simply learn
to loosen your hands,
set it beside the road,
and continue walking.
The cigarette was finished.
My bag was packed.
The city waited behind me.
Home waited ahead.
And for the second time,
the Unbegun began the journey back.
Only this time,
he carried less.
