EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

Ends

There’s a word in the title you’ve been reading wrong your whole life.

Ends.

You read it as stops. Ceases. Finishes. The sidewalk runs out and there’s nothing left. That’s the reading your adult brain defaults to, because adults are trained to hear “end” and think death. Think loss. Think the thing you had is gone now.

But that’s not the only meaning.

“End” also means edge. Boundary. Limit. The end of the table is not where the table dies—it’s where the table’s authority runs out. Beyond that edge, the table has no say over what happens. Gravity takes over. Open air takes over. Possibility takes over.

Where the sidewalk ends is not where the sidewalk dies. It’s where the sidewalk loses jurisdiction.

Read it again with that in mind and the whole poem changes.

It’s not a poem about something disappearing. It’s a poem about something releasing its grip. The concrete, the smoke, the dark winding streets, the asphalt flowers—they don’t follow you past the edge. They can’t. They have no authority there. The sidewalk ends the way a lease ends, the way a sentence ends, the way a bad habit ends: not with destruction, but with the quiet expiration of power over you.

Beyond the edge, the sidewalk cannot tell you where to walk.

Beyond the edge, the schedule cannot tell you when to arrive.

Beyond the edge, the algorithm cannot tell you what to want.

That’s why the grass is soft there. That’s why the wind smells like peppermint. Not because it’s a fantasy. Because nothing manufactured can survive past the boundary of its own infrastructure. The synthetic falls away. What remains is whatever was there before the concrete was poured.

What remains is you. Before the sidewalk told you who to be.

Somewhere tonight, someone who read this whole piece is sitting with a feeling they can’t name. It’s not sadness exactly. It’s not nostalgia exactly. It’s the particular ache of recognizing something you lost so gradually that you never noticed it leaving.

You’re thinking about a specific moment. Maybe you’re seven, drawing on the driveway. Maybe you’re ten, lying in the grass staring at nothing, thinking about everything. Maybe you’re twelve and it’s the last summer before the sidewalk got you—before the path became the point, before the destination swallowed the wandering, before someone convinced you that every minute had to be useful or it was wasted.

That moment is the edge. And you stepped off it without knowing. And you’ve been on the sidewalk ever since.

Here’s the thing about edges, though: they don’t move. The sidewalk can be extended. More concrete can be poured. More structure can be built. But the edge just retreats. It doesn’t disappear. It waits. Patient as dirt. Ready as soil.

You don’t have to run to find it. Silverstein already told you that. Measured and slow will get you there.

You just have to stop walking in the direction the sidewalk wants you to go.

 Step off.

 “For the children, they mark, and the children, they know.”

 END

• F. Tronboll III