It wasn't lost on her that she had walked for several years to a dead end in her neighborhood most days of the week. Inexplicably drawn to it, she would stand with the toes of her sneaker at the needless curb dividing the road to nowhere and the wild growth in the forest. There was an orange signpost dulled by dirt, drips of dew revealing the intended hue of the diamond-shaped metal. There were no words to indicate the sign's intended purpose but she looked at the tearstains nature had left and felt a sort of warning in her body.
Her body was trying to tell her something, but what? Why was it leading her here again and again? Beyond the sign, the brush wasn't anything spectacular. There was a ravine. She could see some type of building on the other side of the divide. She thought she knew which one it was, one she had driven by many times, but it still bewildered her that she could see it from here, not being able to see things from above. The proximity of one thing to another confused her. She could only direct herself to places by memory. If someone told her to go north at a certain landmark or that some place was east of another place, it would mean nothing to her. Shortcuts were impossible because she only went the way she knew to get places. Because of this, she would often find years too late that there were faster ways to get places, only she never knew because she persisted in the route she knew would get her there. But if she could have seen from above, if only she could have zoomed out, it would have made sense to her and she could be like everyone else, taking shortcuts and getting places faster.
As it was, she brought people who knew her to this place, but they saw nothing in it. In fact, they were disappointed and annoyed to have been led to such an underwhelming location with such excitement and anticipation. She couldn't understand why they weren't drawn like she was and why they couldn't see that beyond the ordinary brush the empty ravine and the harsh orange signpost to nowhere, there was a gap. Standing in just the right place, which she always instructed to those she took there, you could see wisteria hanging from the trees in the distance. At just the right time of day, which of course she planned her visits around, the sunrise would hit the wisteria with a golden glow that would halo around the luscious, purple flowers, so abundantly hung from the branches. To her, it looked like some romantic landscape from an English period film. But no one she brought ever saw what she saw.
She began to doubt what she saw was real. Maybe this distant scene wasn't actually there, but she knew, she knew there was wisteria hanging everywhere in this part of town. She had seen it. But maybe she was imagining that too. Maybe she was imagining the sign at the end of the dead end. Maybe it wasn't a dead-end at all, but a road that kept going and she was standing in the middle of a road and anyone who saw her thought she was absurd. People had always looked at her strangely. It's something a person can become desensitized to over time.
With paint, she made the sign so it could exist. If she made it exist, then she wasn't crazy. If she made it exist, maybe she could understand why it mattered.
Years later she went another way. She saw it from the other side and knew her feet walked her to the dead-end because it was the only way she knew to go. Her hands created it so they could convince her that her eyes saw what they saw.
Going another way meant confronting the truth. Her body wanted her to, compelling and compelling her, again and again, to see that she had ended. If she didn't find another way then she could never go further and she would die here, looking at the beauty she could never reach, wishing she could understand why she couldn't get there.