The sounds of old regrets linger long past their welcome. In resonances so rudely quiet as to make one feel nothing but a newfound self-awareness. But then, voices of old, promises of people long since gone and those whispers of emotion they used to make don't seem to ever go away.

He can hear them still. Sitting still and alone in this room, this barren, simple room, he can leave a space for complexities in his mind. Yes, he keeps the physical around him minimal, so that the things he can think up, the people he can recall can be as detailed and as true as he wants. Or as they want.

Yes, there are pictures, there are old clothes and letters and sometimes the occasional object of affection, but the man keeps this place empty. There is just sound.

Sounds in the real world, he thinks, are of the future. If the wind blows just here - just past this tattered curtain and makes a hushed stroking sound, if his old worn stove rings at him in alarm, if a horse from outside cries out for its food or from the flies or the heat – this is the future. He thinks, he has chosen to think (and he knows this) that none of this is in the now. That instead the wind and the stove and the horse and these walls are something of the days to come, something mentioned in passing once long ago. By someone else. Not him, not here.

Yes, this someone else told him once upon a time of a future that is not quite this one. This someone else is a wife who asked for a simple steady life of more than he thought he could give, this someone else is a man to whom he would have given everything, this someone else is a friend to whom he lied, a child he forgot about once too often, a parent he misses now, a beauty he worshipped silently. This someone else fills him now with bitter regrets and keeps him in the present, somewhere between this house, these physical sounds, and the ones he thinks up in loneliness.

So now he wonders just whose future this is. Who this is supposed to belong to, this life, this existence. A compilation, perhaps, of all these nostalgic promises his life is made up of, all the lingering regrets overstaying their welcome? Yes, he thinks at last, yes, this is not mine. I am free.

He gets up. He feels mechanical now, his joints are stiff and his muscles move in grids and arrowed directions. To the sink, to the coat, to the door. To the car outside in the fresh air.

The mountains seem the perfect setting for this life. These monsters of cliché don't loom or impose this time, but simply ask. And the man answers, a firm yes. This time he is leaving. This time, regrets of old will stay of old. His whole life has been made of nothing but promises, nothing but the hopes of others, now washed up and drained of color. And he thinks that at last he will make one of his own, if for no reason but to clean up the scratches and scrapes left between these two warring times. To box up the past in a little hole somewhere in that barren house and let it sit and stay awhile. To make the future – his future – a creation beginning with a truck and the road.

I swear, he says to no one and everyone. He hopes they heard.