The good thing about living in the middle of nowhere was that she always had a place to get lost in. She walked through the woods slowly, careful to avoid tripping on roots, rocks, and fallen branches. Every now and then though, she would pause to look around.

It was the prime of autumn. Dead leafs twirled in their elaborate dance to the forest floor, which was a shallow pool of decomposing vegetation. The roar of summer wildlife had hushed to a quiet hum of scampering rodents and the twittering of birds that still hadn’t migrated to warmer worlds. Occasionally, the ashy sky would echo with the honking of geese in perfect V-formation. They said that geese never leave a member of their flock behind. She secretly hoped that this was true. She weaved in and out of the skyscraper trees. The bark was still dark with this morning’s rainfall. She breathed in the rich, earthy scent. Lichen and moss seemed to cling wherever the leaves did not cover. The flash of green so starkly contrasted with the sunset kaleidoscope around her.

She stopped at a sapling, cradling its small, but sturdy trunk in her palm. It was only a little taller than her, yet it already looked like it would be here for centuries. There was a steep incline in front of her, and she had to plan her route wisely if she hoped to climb it. Her eyes weaved an uncertain line between boulders, saplings, and rotting logs. She sucked in a damp breath and pushed forward. At first, she stood upright, trying to mimic the stubbornness of the trees that grew stick straight on this slanted hill. However, the incline got the best of her knobby ankles, and soon she was reduced to crawling on her hands and knees. This forced de-evolution made her smile though. She relished the feeling of wet dirt, pebbles, and bits of leaves adhering to her hands. She savored the grit that borrowed underneath her fingernails. The cold wetness soaked through her jeans and her shoes. She felt alive in the most primal sense of the word.

After half an hour of this slow, stumbling progression, she reached the top of the hill. She pulled herself to the level ground and collapsed in a panting heap. She peered down at what she had just overcome, and she surprised just how much steeper it looked from the top. She spent a while up there, catching her breath. There was not a soul present for miles. She was truly alone and free.

She only let herself feel when she was truly certain that no one would be here to witness it. She let herself remember every painful detail of her life. Her fingers curled around the carpet of decaying leaves. Her skin withered as it recalled the dress her sister wore in her coffin, the six bottles of pills that lined her mother’s medicine cabinet, and the way her boss’s lip curled when he told her she was ‘sexy.’ She felt this pain and she screamed. She screamed and cried and tossed her soul between the tree branches. Her howl echoed in the empty spaces in the woods and in her ribcage. No longer was she numb. She screamed for her lost girlhood. She screamed for the woman she had become. She cried for herself and for the broken pieces of her loved ones. And once her lungs were vacant and her throat devoid of sound, she was reborn, stronger and whole.