The Walk

The ground isn’t soft, yet it brings satisfaction to walk it barefoot. The soil is cold and damp, making Sandra’s feet predominantly aware of the freezing sensation traveling from her soles to her thighs, to her neck. She’s barely wearing anything, but her shame, her old scars, and her shadows. The air is damp and its humidity gets impregnated on her skin like a stamp while she looks around grasping her breaths.

"Dear forest, where..." she whispers, "where do I go?"

She steps on stinging nettle and attempts to scream, only to notice that her voice is not as loud as she knows it can be. She rubs her right foot with imposed tenderness and chooses to keep walking on the moss-veiled trail to her left. She finds forests fascinating, the balance between pulsing flora and mystic fauna. She wonders if those landscapes are where the souls go to sleep. She suddenly stops at the sound of some crunching twigs behind her. She looks back and sees the scenery she was just looking towards and after biting her lip for ten seconds, she continues to walk.

She knows it’s daytime because of the weak light getting through the trees, but the sun rays are not by her side today. She counts with her fingers the potential hours she has left until finding a safe space to spend the night. ‘Maybe two’, she says out loud while trying to identify the trees around her. She can recognize plenty of cypress trees, some birch, adler, and plenty of willows. Every direction she looks towards is dense, and fearful to make a decision, she hugs herself, faces the sky, and closes her eyes. After taking a deep breath and some minutes to caress her skin, wet her lips, and slightly balance herself to the right and left, she decides to go south.

She turns around hoping the south she’s walking towards is the actual south she’s needing. While moving her feet one after another, she shivers at the intrusive thoughts traveling in and out of her consciousness like a knife piercing her stomach, crossing different layers of skin, muscle, and organ. She takes both hands to her face and attempts to shake off her thoughts as if she was getting rid of a spiderweb she had just walked right through.

Like a persistent itch that always creeps back in, Eva keeps making her way to Sandra’s mind and begging for attention. Her twin is going to go with her wherever she goes and there’s no forest big enough for the drowns of sorrow she has upon her. Together since the womb, connected since the beginning of time, and always meant to flame as one, Sandra was walking away from much more than her life. She was walking away from half of her soul.

She throws herself on the wet floor and shouts fiercely.

"I am so sorry. Eva, I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me, I could have never stayed" she cries as she grabs a pine cone and stares at it.

She turns it around with her right-hand side, while softly touching its edges with her left. It is getting dark but she can still appreciate the temporality of its presence. She closes her eyes and imagines the pine cone up in the tree, growing, watching life go by, the days, the nights. The different weather, the different moisture in the air. At some point, it falls and hits the ground. Is it the pine cone letting go or is it the tree? Who lets go of who?

A sudden sound hits Sandra like a whip and she drops the pine cone as she gets up and turns around. She tucks her hair behind her ears in an attempt to listen more carefully to the sound, although she’s quite sure that she just listened to a night owl.

Before the majestic animal attempts to squick again, she spots the creature sitting on a branch on a tree to her left. Its pose is intimidating but calming. It's feeling of wisdom is invigorating, and its eyes remind her of Eva’s, intense but soft.

"Is this where you want to be?" she asks the owl, surprised by the crashing echo of her own voice.

The owl stays still, looking right at her. The silence around them is immense, light is almost completely gone. The trees are breathing and the ground under Sandra’s feet is getting colder.

"Is this where I am meant to be?" she directs again at the owl.

She stares at the owl also staring back at her. She explores the pine tree hosting such a grandiose animal. She wonders how old the tree is while she remembers an article she read about the oldest pine tree ever found, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, apparently over 4,800 years old. She gets envious of the amount of things that the old tree must have witnessed, and tears pour down her face at the anger of life slipping through her fingers.

Is the tree letting go of the pine cone, or is it the pine cone letting go of the tree?

"It is where you are" concludes the owl.