Questions Without Answers

The smell of damp leaves, the squelch of boots on a muddy path, the last autumn leaves being rattled by the breeze on the now almost naked trees. Those are the things I recognise when looking at this picture. Who the people are and where they're going are what I don't know, but to be quite honest, I wouldn't want to. Since this picture doesn't bring me back memories from a certain event, I enjoy the fact that I can live into the moment of it... travelling in thought to an uncertain destination. My mind scrolls through my list of travelling adventures and I wonder if those 3 hikers experienced any similar ones. To be quite fair there must actually be at least four of them since one is taking the photo. Are there any others behind him/her?.. What sort of people would they be then. In the picture it looks like a youth outing, but who knows, maybe the parents are just standing behind the photographer. It's strange to think that this photo is to one of those travellers a very long narrative. To me its worth lies not in the fact that it's part of a story with an ending, but rather that the story itself is unknown to me. It appeals to my adventurous side and triggers my mind into living through a thousand possible excitements along a path that may actually have been rather uneventful in reality. The feelings the photo awakes in me are a bit contradictory in that way. Just as much as it appeals to me because I can relate to it through my own memories of hikes I've been on, I like the fact that their hike is still a mystery to me. The picture holds questions without answers, or answers I don't want to know because in my mind I'm enjoying exploring every one of the fifty different answers I've thought up so far...

submitted by Cherry Magnet, Age 20 Portstewart, USA

| Next Essay | Back to Gallery |