I wish this was a jungle for you. I wish, with each sentence passing before your eyes, you felt as if you were cleaving tropical branches, evading layered leaves, parting brush underfoot, following the sound of falling water, perspiring from every pore, gaining valiant speed, hurdling natural obstacles, running to the rhythm of your own savage heart. I wish, for your sake, that you felt truly like the animal that you are, acquiring abrasions on your skin as a testament to your expedition. I wish I could conjure a foreign landscape, a terrain for you to uncover, feel, make your own. I wish these words could elicit the dilation of your pupils, lengthen your limbs, climb your cliffs for you.

They cannot. I cannot.

What I learned lately is that life is a mastering of topography and currently I am a prairie – untouched, un-bended by breezes. I am
flat
bland
monotonous
straight
dull
content.

Forest branches, proving to be ineffective rungs, have already severed my vessels. Hot blood red and everywhere. Mountain air has left me light-headed, comatose, thin. I have toppled into wasted valleys and been carried along by unstopping streams, flushed into oceans much too vast, those oceans now tucked securely in my pockets, those glaciers melting and trickling down my temperate thighs. I have trekked my way home through swampy, leech-infested marshes, hanging my head heavy and low the whole way, dragging with me my own languid limbs. I have knocked on Atmosphere’s door, asked if I really belong here on Earth.

I have arrived at a meadow.

Yes, studio apartment, solitude, a letting go, a candle and cigarette lit, belly full of food, I am roughly the most joyful person on this planet. A stretch of meadow before and inside me, a buzzing of bees, a budding of flowers, a space to run and roam and roll on steady stable sturdy sassy soil. I am the bliss beneath my blisters.