Prologue
I am in control of everything I am doing, but I am driving without knowing where I am going. The wheel is in front of me, and there is a cardboard tree dangling from the rearview mirror that should smell like something, but I forgot what it was a long time ago, and both of these things should solidify the fact that I am in this car and driving with as much purpose as anybody else, but a foreign logic is beginning to drive a wedge into that normalcy.
I look out the window. An endless sea of wheat greets me. An endless heat greets the stalks that only the sky above can release them from. But the sky is silent.
I had thought that I was the one who ended it all, but the last thing I remember is being told to pack my things and go.
So, I do not know anymore. I do not know what I am doing. I do not know the community where I was very well. Whatever job I had was just for the money and honestly I do not know what marriage even means anymore.
I am in Kansas but I will not be in Kansas for very long. Fact bleeds into dream into fact into dream. Somewhere within me lies a molting euphoria. A present wrapped in a bow but not under the Christmas tree. It's dormant and only stays there as long as I am in control. My control is a sludge of mucous that slows everything around it.
Innocence. What about innocence? An approach where nothing has scarred me yet? My mind would be freer; I am slipping.
Logic. What if I'm less trapped in my head; able to treat things as just mathematical probabilities? Would she love me more that way? I am slipping faster.
I close my eyes and smell the rich scent of pine once more.
1
The first thing I feel when I step out of the car and into the rainforest pulp is a sense of overwhelming elation. It follows me as I follow a dirt path with trees on both sides and sun above. Inside inside me a voice screams finally, but I do not recall where the beginning was, much less the context of the journey to such a feeling of 'finality.'
Now there is a light that pours into me, an extraordinary kind of light perpendicular to yet sympathetic to the sunlight, dancing with it from another plane. A surging warmth oozes into my creases and bends, and my mind opens up like flowers unfurling on the fast-forwarded nature docs I watched as a little girl. I close, open my eyes and all at once the forest is an ocean, the path is its seafoam, nestled in the curves of its turbulent waves, winding from one valley to the next with a rhythmic conscience. It is all so wonderfully beautiful. I press the lock button on my keys, and the responding sound seems so far away.
At that moment my elation bleeds into a palpable sense of giddiness at the prospect of submissiveness. There is a sort of joy in letting something else take over your choice-making, especially when that something is in a place beyond you, not in the horizon but behind it; something without need for human blood or human brains or human joints or human hearts, one that knows what you need without the need of a tool for knowing.
The further I go along the cobbled trail the more I feel the pull of Mother, the pull of her gravity, the gravity that attracts me and me only. I round the next curve, and now to my right there are an abundance of ferns, so I extend my hand and caress the fronds. Their ripples bounce into the cracks of my fingers and I look into the distance beyond the ferns and see a doe. Its head is perpendicular to my line of sight and stays so still, almost as if it were killed and taxidermied and the taxidermist felt bad so she brought it back to life again just to place it here for me. On its head were a small set of antlers and they were covered with a light fuzz like the moss covering the trees around. No, the more I look the more the fuzz does become moss, it becomes life in itself, life clinging to the doe's antlers. I must tell Mother about this! I tear my gaze away from the doe and to the path in front of me where a butterfly of light dances in the air, and once I see it, it flutters down the path and around a corner to the left. I rush after it.
