In the first time, when the world was still learning what it wanted, there was a person whose want pointed west.
It had always pointed west. From the age of memory, there was a pull in that direction, soft but constant, the way water finds its level. The person could not see the pull. They could only feel which way it aimed.
They built their life in the place they were born, which was not west. They had work and children and seasons. They learned to notice the pull the way you learn to notice your own heartbeat: always there, not always attended to. When they walked west to the river, the pull gathered. When they walked east to the market, it softened. They did not move west. There was no reason to move that would have answered the pull's question.
What they did instead: they walked west to the river bend each morning for forty years, which was as far as the pull seemed to concentrate itself, and then they walked east again. This was not a decision made once. It was a decision made every morning, which is a different thing.
The path wore into the ground between the house and the river bend. Paths appear where people walk, and this is ordinary. But this path was a little wider than use alone would have made it, because they walked it with their whole attention, and attention is a kind of weight.
They stood at the bend each morning for a while. The river went south. The pull remained west. They did not know what was west. They had never gone to find out. After a long time they would turn and walk east, back to the house, to whatever the day was.
After they died, the path remained. People used it. Children ran it for the pleasure of running. A footbridge was built at the bend much later, and the path extended past the river and continued west, so that now it went somewhere, had a reason, carried traffic of many kinds. No one remembered the person who had worn it or why they had walked it every morning with such deliberate attention.
The path ran west from where the house had been to the river and across.