At the edge of the town, where the neon flickered and finally perched in silence, is usually the beginning of a tale. It is an amazing city, and it hides the city's truth within the heart of the town-silenced crowds, noise, and commerce-but here souls can be found at the fringes. Fewer houses, loved solitary street lamps, and the air has the taste of both leaving and coming home.
The town's periphery is neither merely a coordinate on a map nor a solid physical location; it is that threshold that is charged with tension by those who leave and those who cannot. A territory for the bus station, motels with flickering neon signs, and diners that never close. There be drifters with dusty suitcases and dreamers whose gazes dwell on horizons that promised far more than the center ever could.
The edge is an imagination's home. The child is out looking beyond the fields and sees not emptiness but endless possibilities, while the old man remembers sitting on the bench and maybe recalling his first crossing of that boundary a few decades ago without imagining how the road would be meaningful for him.
The town has its fringe; whether you view it or not, that fringe is where certainty meets the realm of the unknown and comfort dances with the extraordinary. Walking there is an experience of the heartbeat of transition-a reminder that towns, just like life, are perpetually pouring into something new.
