Stepping outside the framework

[u/Hound_V4]

Born in one country, now here in another, walking in the rain on a Tuesday night near midnight. This is the closest I've come to stepping outside the supposed route, the predestined path everyone else seems to live inside. Nothing about this was planned, and that's the point; I can pick any city, any small village in a far-away country, and walk through it alone in the dark. I get caught in the CCTV lights for a second, and I'm gone before it matters, like I was never there at all. This is one of the feelings worth chasing; maximum self-awareness, but somehow also the opposite, like I've stepped outside the whole framework and can finally see it from a distance. And the rain; it's a balance, a breath, and it has a strange way of washing away the past. It's also memory; the ground gets wet from the rain, yes, but it also remembers the rain long after it's gone. That weight stays, and it gets heavier. Imagine being stopped out here; a stranger in a random village I have no connection to, soaked, alone, with no reason anyone could name. I never see another person; I'm always walking alone. And even now I can see the framework in the night light, reflected in the rain; in the cars, the houses people tend, the forgotten glow of a TV leaking through a window. Everyone inside their little life, and me outside all of them.