Solitude In Nature

An end of the year assignment written for my senior year english class.

I walk at the edge of a man-marked path, trailing fresh footprints along the muddy banks of the rushing riptides of the river. With only two other people I go, off the predetermined tracks, to wander wherever we’ll fit. It’s stinging, sweaty, secret work that, as we go, catches the sun in our skin and the laughter in our throats. The sky is a sheet of eggshell blue overhead, dotted intermittently with grey-white clouds. Back to the world, gaze skimming the opposite bank, I watch the water run its rolling course away, away, away. I consider, briefly, the idea of how it would be to collapse myself bodily into the brown roil of its depths, how it would feel to be carried off to the edges of the world, how it would be so peaceful to disperse as rapidly as snowy dandelion fluff.

But then we’re off again, tugging each other through damp green glades, under leaves deep enough to drink the dew from.  Under the heat of the day, we tightrope-walk fallen logs frosted with slippery moss and sunshine yellow flowers. I imagine slipping off the bark and falling wherever it takes me- away, away, away. When I actually do slip, soft skin of my ankle scraping rough wood, I rub the stinging redness with a laugh. The firmness of the earth under my shoe grounds me, brings me back to this miniscule piece of the world, just one of millions of little patchy forests. Face tilted upwards in the crispness of the shade, where the daylight spots warmly through the branches, I listen to the shrieking, squealing, jeering of my classmates. I don’t bother with putting names to faces, instead let the moment tumble about my head, untethered. Right now, nothing else exists.