“Keep walking”

“Keep walking” is Jeevan Chaudhary’s refrain during his solitary journey through the winter landscape after leaving Toronto. Repeated as his biographical memories fragment, the phrase gives him a simple instruction to hold onto when neither the road ahead nor his place in the world is secure.

A Command Against Disintegration

Before setting out, Jeevan watches the expressway through a telescope and sees only two people, both moving away from downtown. The silence from Frank’s bedroom weighs on him; he checks that Frank is not breathing, even though he knows the second check is irrational. In the apartment’s final hours, he also finds Frank’s unfinished manuscript and pockets a page bearing a handwritten thought about immortality. Loss, uncertainty, and the decision to leave are therefore already bound together when Jeevan begins walking.

As he travels, Jeevan tries to anchor himself with biographical facts: his name, his former work as a photographer, his plans to become a paramedic, his parents, his birthplace, and the house he once had. The recitation breaks apart into fragments, and he repeats “Keep walking” instead. The shift is from a story about who he has been to an instruction for what he must do next. The phrase offers no assurance about an eventual destination; its force lies in narrowing survival to the next step.

Walking as a Survival Choice

Jeevan resolves to follow the lake, keeping to its difficult gravel-and-rock beach rather than the roads whenever possible. Snow and twilight make the route physically uncertain, and he worries about twisting an ankle and leaving footprints. He is also intent on avoiding other people. The command to keep walking thus accompanies a deliberate choice of route and a wary effort to preserve distance from potential danger, not simply a general resolve to endure.

The roads present a different set of risks: abandoned cars and bodies, frightened travelers, hungry dogs, and gunfire in towns. Jeevan searches country houses for canned food while avoiding occupied roads and settlements. Against this landscape, the repeated phrase is both practical and psychological. Movement carries him onward, while its repetition helps him maintain a tenuous hold on his identity as the familiar structures of daily life disappear.

A World of Broken Connections

Jeevan’s walking belongs to a broader transformation in which movement has lost its former speed and reliability. Air travel has ended as an ordinary system: planes remain on runways and in hangars, where they gather snow and are put to seasonal use as food stores. The contrast is not simply between flight and walking, but between a world in which distant places could be crossed routinely and one in which travel must be negotiated on foot through obstructed roads and unsafe towns.

Kirsten Raymonde’s account of leaving Toronto offers a separate instance of that change. As the neighborhood empties, Peter Raymonde hotwires an abandoned car for them, but the expressway ramps and side roads are blocked by abandoned vehicles. They eventually walk, crossing an open border after the guards have left. Her account does not use Jeevan’s refrain, but it places his chosen movement within a shared post-collapse reality: when vehicles and public systems fail, walking becomes a means of escape as well as endurance.

The Phrase’s Force

“Keep walking” is not a declaration that survival is assured. It is a compact form of self-direction spoken under conditions in which certainty, companionship, and a settled destination have all become difficult to rely on. Its repetition marks both Jeevan’s mental strain and his continued capacity to act: even when his account of himself breaks down, he can still give himself an instruction and follow it.