The gate

 Everyday he went out for a walk. 

He did not know what he was looking for, but it seemed as if he was always searching. As if he would at some point find anything. An answer. While he didn't even know what question was being asked. 

As his feet hit the gravel in the path, he wondered mildly what it would be like to simply start running. But he didn't have the disposition to. 

He would walk until he was on the riverside and for a while there was concrete and block pathway, until it gave into to a trail among grass and weed made up of an ever humid earth and sometimes even gravel. 

And he had always walked that path. Ever the same. Concrete blocks, giving away to nature. The perfect clash between urban and nature. 

He went back and forth. 

Until today. When he finally found somehting. 

He had never noticed that by the riverside there was a gate. 

It was a very solid iron gate, the white paint covering old and marred by time. 

Said gate was covered in menacing barbed wires and along with the sign that covered it, it sent the message that it was forbidden to walk through it. 

Beyond the gate there was a walkway, made out of concrete, which gave out to a footbridge made out of wood with handles on the side. 

It was strange because even though he had been up and down this path a million times, he had never crossed upon that gate. He'd never encountered said bridge. It was like those elements had been conjured out of sheer will. 

And it couldn't have been built from one day to the other. The thing looked old and weathered and certainly abandoned and poorly kept. As if it had been built, used for the longest time and now it was just abandoned. 

His eyes could not muster where  that footbridge led. It went farther and farther into the river until he could not see where it lead. It seemed to lead into the other margin. What a bridge is supposed to do. Connect the two ends. 

But that day he thought nothing of it. He continued on his usual walk and bit bothered because he had never noticed that gate and that pathway. 

Going back home he had already put the gate and the walkway out of his mind. After all any adult person had other things on their mind. 

The next day, waking up early he dressed for his walk and as he was quickly going down the stairs he sprained his ankle, and so for a week he could not go for his usual walk. 

Dreams of the gate opening and him walking the footbridge during the night plagued him. He did not understand why he was dreaming of such things. He hadn't even noticed the thing was there before, he had only seen it once and not even considered it again. Nevertheless, as his limb decreased the swelling, his will to go there and look at the goddamned gate and put it out of his mind loomed over him. 

As soon as he got better, because until getting to the riverside it was long walk, he put on his sneakers and walked the same concrete blocked ground, that then gave into nature and gravel. As he went up and down the path he was shocked and bothered because there wasn't any gate, nor a footbridge. No walkway. He felt simply insane that something he had seen and then constantly dreamt about just wasn't there. 

Had it all been a dream? Had he not seen the gate? Was it all just a figment of his imaginaton? 

Finishing his usual walk he tried to put the gate out of his mind as best as he could. 

But the thought of seeing something that he had never noticed before, and then dreaming about it and going to it and never seeing again was just tormenting.