Hiking Alone

No pace to keep.

My thoughts are my own.

The wind pets my skin, close to the bone.

The wilds' eyes upon me

My presence, unremarkable.

Legs burn with lactic acid up the steepest of inclines.

I float in my mind

Constellations of abstractions,

Memories casting light-years into the future.

High up on a cliff of intoxicating thought

I’m with you, with him, with her who's ever meant anything to me.

I’m Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,

The girl who plays with cats.

Never let a workout get in the way of an experience,

and the hum of a cat's revving engine is among them.

I am the little girl who doesn’t need a babysitter anymore, because she can occupy Herself with errant branches she finds in the woods

She builds a fort;

She climbs a fort.

She goes the distance with her feet and with her mind.

She is happy here.

And it’s as simple and as complicated as that.

I am happy here, where thoughts are streams and dense woods.

Thought carbons give oxygen to my expansion..

The photosynthesis of nostalgia giving life and meaning to the present

I’m the selfish little girl in latchkey

who

when given the option to share the coloring book with the other children

or to put it away in her cubby hole and take it home...

takes the book home.

The pages were mine--a gift from my mother.

No one was going to color or scribble on my pages. I’d rather be alone.

And now, I walk in solitude, with no one to scribble my thoughts.

Some things never change.

These pages are mine, but if I love you,

I’ve let you help me choose some of the colors .

My mother gave me this book, and there are lines.

I won’t risk them being colored outside of.

I won’t risk someone coloring outside of my lines.