No North Star

I cant remember if she was talking to me in a living room, or walking out a door into the cold night. The memory that hits me is fragmented, and possibly combining the words with the wrong place. Rolling up of memory, fragments forming bastard children of a weekend drunk and a weekday lunch. I shake my head and continue packing.
This isn't right. I'm packing my ruck, the hard used Lowe-Alpine pack dreams are made of. The one that's seen 10,000 feet, and subterranean depths. Filling it with the stuff of adventures, emergency tools, a medical kit, a pistol and magazines, and a flask of smooth Canadian whiskey. The change of clothes is spare, leaving room for an extra jacket and dry wool socks. This is a loadout for adventuring, or even escape, yet I am doing neither.
I'll toss the ruck, when I'm done with it, atop a plastic tub filled with laundry I need to wash. My mom will roll her eyes when I unload it, and I'll insist I may be bringing it home, but I can do my own. And in the morning it will be washed and in the dryer waiting for me to fold it.
The way I travel is a cry for help. A railing against attitudes of sloth and depression, against the routine of non-achievement. It begs for the excitement I lack day to day. Like a condom in the wallet, my rucksack poses as "being prepared", and is in actuality a cry into the darkness for the light of adrenaline, power, danger, and lust. I will take it with me, all packed and little used, just in case. In case, somewhere in the darkness of my own making, I find salvation.

The confusion of memory, and routine of packing to go home for Christmas, have me listening to the road outside. Anyone going westbound on Sixty is pointed toward Arizona, mountains and meadows, and the faraway smell of high pine wet with snow. My thumb throbs with each heart beat, just to hang it out there in the cold air and see where it takes me. But I wont. I will go home, like I should, where my mother is waiting, and continue on as I have been. I cannot tell if I am utilizing common sense, or if I no longer trust in my own navigation. I have no north star, other than the immediate, or temporal. Like a man fallen and rolling down hill, I am guided by gravity.