#Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni (1816)

[kaleuh]

this is maybe gonna sound fucked up but recently i've been thinking about if i was born as an animal like a wild dog or a wolf or something i'd be way happier than i am now. occasionally i feel like i'm just an animal that got granted a human life. every time i think about bounding through a meadow of tall grass, or having the sun on my ears, listening to the wind racing in the clouds, i just crave that life so desperately. I could do this as a girl, sure, but there's a perfect, messy lawlessness that comes from belonging (and fully belonging) to nature. You trade away the comforts of safety, of course, but you get the ultimate form of freedom, in the plainest way one can be free. you can live as yourself, and die as yourself. nature doesn't concern itself with semantics. one day you are, and then, you are not. but you lived. and this is the one thing you get to know for certain.

Once, years ago, I ended up at a place called Bolton Landing, far up in the fingertips of the Adirondacks. Before everything, before the Sun, while I was still trying to understand what i was, I felt it. Like twin claws in my back, scraping down on either side of my spine, as if to release something from an old and aching bind. I saw it. When I looked at the pines, and felt the car rushing past the forest, sloping, snow touched, in an ancient disposition that bore into me for longer than what made sense. The staring contest of the wild. It was ordaining me to blink, so that i could open my eyes to that world. I did. I nearly started crying. It was something I missed, somehow. it was something i knew intimately, for longer than my years.

Kerri recalls me having a strange look in my eye. She knew something happened because I couldn't keep conversation, and couldn't peel myself away from the window. But, much like many of these experiences in my life, no one could empathize. The platitudes of nature simply being a pretty thing makes me feel like an island.

I've spent these past few years walking with my posture straight, balanced and poised for people. I want my world returned, the one I know. The one I've always been here for.

I want my centuries back.