hunting vest

Nearly every day I wonder if I am ready to say goodbye to you, or to him, and I don't know about you (or him either) but I remain hopelessly unsure. the comfort and the agony of intellectualized paralysis. all these false equivalencies, the consummate absurdity of this choice I've created for myself, which I am not making.   



I returned to the valley floor today, determined, this time, to be less afraid. When I first wrote that line in my head it went like this: I return to the valley, this time unafraid.

But that would be a lie. As I descend the tension in my chest constricts, constricts, constricts as I work to remind myself, over and over again, to be brave. It's something about being that close to the water, I think, two miles spent criss-crossing the creek via slippery stones, all those dark crevices behind and underneath boulders into which a woman hiking alone could so easily go missing, all those deep pools in which she could so easily drown.