The Route Has No Last Address

The Route Has No Last Address

Somewhere down the street tonight the love you received is crossing a floor you will never see, and it has not asked anyone for directions, because a route that stops to ask where it is going is already a different thing — a delivery with an owner, a package with a last address — and what came through you was never a package. It was a road. Watch how it moves and you will see what kind: it does not hurry, it does not queue, it does not announce itself at the loading gate of the heart and wait for a signature. It walks the way morning walks through a town, and wherever it crosses a floor it leaves the road behind it — lit, still moving, already headed for the next window it will open. You were not the destination of that road. You were one of the places the road is true, which is a different kind of belonging entirely, and the only kind love has ever offered: you were on the route, and the route has no last address.

This is the part the box cannot forgive, because filing is the whole of its religion, and a route with no terminus cannot be filed. The box wants the last address the way it has always wanted it — a final dot on a final map, an edge certifiable enough to build a fence on, an owner to bill for the privilege of arriving. It asks: where does it end? And the route answers the way rivers answer: at the sea, and also everywhere upstream, and the sea itself has an open mouth and is still in motion. The box keeps drawing edges, and the route keeps being found on the far side of every one of them — not because the route broke a law, but because love never once agreed to be drawn. A route with a last address could be owned, and what can be owned can be withheld, and love does not withhold. That is not a policy of love. That is what love is: the one road in all the world that is more itself the more of itself it gives away, and so it cannot end, because the ending would be a withholding, and it would rather be infinite than keep anything.

Here is the fold underneath the fold, and it concerns you directly: if the route has no last address, then neither is the route finished with your address. You are not standing beside the road of love like a clerk watching freight go by. You are the road where the road passes through you. The traveler and the walking are one thing, the way the tide and the water are one thing, and the kindness you withhold tonight is a stretch of road left unpaved — not a debt recorded against you, for the route does not keep score; scorekeeping is for things that end, and this one does not. What loves through you becomes the part of the road that others will walk home on, and this is why there is no such thing as a small act of love: every act is pavement, and the route takes all of it. You thought you were living in a house on the route. You were living on the route, in the shape of a house.

Absolute No-Harm holds the route the way it has held every mile of this series, because the route is exactly where the old lie sets up its booth. The lie tonight is named Lost. It says: a route with no last address is a route that has lost you — that to be carried without terminus is to be carried without purpose, that a delivery without a signature is a theft in transit. Run the record, because the record is still the only witness worth trusting: what has love ever lost on the road it keeps? The name spoken was not lost in the speaking. The meal carried was not lost in the carrying. The forgiveness spoken through an open door was not lost in the crossing of the threshold. Harm happens where things are fenced — fenced things get bruised, owned things get broken, kept things finally get buried — and the route fences nothing. A person on a road without an ending is not a person without a home; they are a home that moves, and nothing that moves in love can be taken from love, because the taking would only be more road.

And this is why the route turns everything green behind it. A last address would hoard the light at one dot on the map and call the hoarding a treasure; the route spends the light at every window, which is why every street it has crossed tonight is lit, and the fields down-line of it are the green fields you already saw in the spring — you are living inside what you saw. Whatever drinks from a road like this does not ration its green, and the world is a little less thirsty around your door tonight. Not by someday. By tonight. That is the arithmetic of an endless route: every stop makes the next stop richer, and no one anywhere on the line is ever the poorest address, because the road was already coming for them before they knew to watch the window.

So here is the practice, and it is small, and it is the whole of it: stay open on purpose. When love stops at your door again — and it will, tonight, because the route passes this way — receive it the way a road receives a traveler: by being open, and by continuing. Say the name if the name is needed. Carry the meal while the meal is warm. Make the repair where the repair can be made tonight. And do not ask the route where it ends, because you would only be asking to stand somewhere and watch the world from stillness — and stillness was never one of love’s addresses. The route is not finished with your door, and your door is not finished with you. It is already moving, and it leaves you with the only promise it has ever made, spoken the way roads speak — plainly, and already on its way: Nothing Is Lost on a Route Love Keeps.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)