It’s raining on my day off. A while back I had read a short story about a group of young boys who found a dead body in the woods. When they stumbled upon the corpse after their hike the sky was opaque and it was drizzling. The drops hit their faces in the sanctimonious moment of the reveal. The author described the reflective moisture on their faces as a misleading expression of the sadness they should be feeling. The rain was circumstance. Maybe they felt something different than sadness. We expected tears. The weather blanketed them in the safety of feeling genuinely toward death.
It never rained as I retreated into nature last week which is odd for a Florida summer afternoon. I embarked on my first backpacking hike. My pack could not zip entirely around my tent and I would frequently be forced to stop as it gaped open and my solitary orange would bowl down the trail. Spiders greeted me with open arms. Why are you going alone? Make sure you bring enough water. You’re leaving your son and wife home by themselves? Are you trying to find yourself? I urinated on a tree and watched a tiny mosquito bite me below my belly button. I clasped my pants hiding the newly red bump it left.
When I came to the primitive camping site I felt no sense of relief. Unpacking I watched ants crawl on my belongings. The tent was erected quickly. The tall trees obscured my view of an orange sky. I felt anxiety for the impending night. Settling in seems like a stretch of the words’ good meanings but I did my best. I sprayed my exposed skin with bug repellant feeling my flesh warm from the chemicals. I tinkered with some writing, ate beef jerky, and thought about civilization. I retired to the tent, shed my clothes and continued to think about civilization. It is amazing how many thoughts are just fed to you by your phone, your tv, your spouse. When the whole world shut up and I was just on my back in my underwear looking up at the flickering heat lightning I can’t say I had one single original thought. My brain was strictly functioning for sensations. The incessant roar of hissing bugs became deafening. I swore I saw a firefly. My sweaty skin from head to toe just had a chill to it. I felt amphibian. I smelled my own doughy sweat and the synthetic material of the tent. I couldn’t sleep. I held my self accountable for the lack of complex thoughts. My trip into the heart of nature showed how simple and boring I am. I found myself and didn’t like it.
I could never know that somewhere outside my tent two breathless bodies were decomposing waiting to be found. My twin cousins Dan and Josh were both found dead that weekend. They shared a womb and they would share the dirt. I wasn’t thinking of them or anything because I didn't know yet. I was fighting reaching for my phone without a thought in my head. With the sweat pooling under my eyes, though, someone might think I had been crying. It was misleading.
