lost

Sitting here - munching roasted peppers, turkey sausages and a portobello mushroom - brought back a memory that I probably haven't recalled since the event that furnished me with it in the first place. In the best of fashions, it is related neither to my dinner, nor anything else that I've done in the last few hours, days or months.

Which is why I get on well with my mind; saltatory thought processes might make me a bit weird to be around, but at least I can keep myself entertained when sat on a chair in a bare room with white walls, piped white-noise and a chilly draft. What, you didn't grow up in one of those?

I am alone, having been walking for about three and a half hours since I last saw a person. By now the path has degraded into the faintest of trails, partly hidden by leaves, obscured sometimes entirely by masses of tangled roots. The air temperature is 37 degrees centigrade; standing pools bring the humidity toward saturation, so that what I feel comes closer to 45.

The trees here are ancient, belonging to one of the oldest known stands of virgin rainforest in the world; their roots are buttresses, so massive that their lignified vasculature forms undulating walls a number of feet taller than I am, and many times as wide. What I like best is how they make me feel; inconsequential, surrounded by venerable, silent giants of immeasurable age. And when you can shout, and cry, and run and dance and scream and be all that you aren't in the world of men, no one to hear you, no one to undermine, none obstructing your desire to feel, you come alive; it never goes away. A time and a place where you can't be anything but yourself.

I know what I miss.