after hiking in the rain

There is a singular, lonely feeling that comes with speaking words that have some value to you, out loud, to a person who, as it turns out, wasn’t listening. They turn and smile and say, innocently, “What?” And you’re there, trying to recover from the realization that you can’t identify what another person’s attention looks like. I woke up that way this morning. Feeling like I had to muster up the courage to repeat something. Or not say something at all, even though I had intended to say it. I was up early enough to warrant headlights. And my tank was full of gas.

Speeding over highway while the sun rises, the city shrinking in the rearview, I am singing my loudest to a song I would never admit liking had I a passenger. The windows are down and my hair is crazy crazy crazy.

The lanes get fewer and narrower. I chase the sun through windy roads; it ducks behind pine trees that are impossibly tall. When I get out, my legs take their time remembering how to walk. I just stare at the trees. A little girl in my memory had a yard dotted with birch trees. She tore scrolls from the trunks and wrote crayon stories. She put the scrolls back around the trees afterwards, letting them hang there, or sent them floating like boats down a stream. In the time between those birches and womanhood, she had come to place value only on words heard by others. Asking, always, “Listen. Listen. Hear me.” How to exhume a person who thinks trees and streams a fine audience?

I’m staring at the trail map, turning it and turning it. I can never establish which way I’m facing. I start walking without destination. When faced with a fork, I consult the map and head, I think, toward water. My breath and footfalls sound foreign, I feel like a secret guest. The mountain tops are both close and distant, indifferent to me. If they had faces they’d always look away. I stop, periodically, to appreciate my smallness.

That’s it, then. It’s the being wrong that hurts. When a little girl sends a story woven from some now untouchable imagination off to the stream, she expects no answer. She is giving her story away, and that intention protects the words’ value. When we mutter our thoughts to the woods it is so that we can hear them, unobstructed by sirens and televisions and all the metronomic ticking and clicking of city life. We so rarely get to listen to ourselves. But when we give words to someone else it is risky. Stuttering mumbling under the breath shy attempts at talking, all defenses against speaking to someone who doesn’t hear. Someone who looks you right in the eye for the duration of a sentence and then has to say, “What?”

The lake arrives, spreads herself out for me, completely silent and beachless. A patch of sand large enough for my feet sends me into the water. I float, and the water swallows me. My ears take it in and the trees’ susurrations are replaced with the muffled underwater silence that is not quiet but not loud. The sky is white, and rains a little. I stare at my things piled on the bank. Plastic and nylon and leather. It’s funny how one day can continually redefine the word necessary. I kick myself in circles, a small white naked little boat. I am the object of zero attention. The rain and the trees and the patch of sand cannot listen or speak, and cannot know that I am lost. And I can’t tell the difference between raindrops and tears, but I am crying.