Closed Back in Touch With the Grass SOLO

Humans are habitual creatures. We create routines and forge paths that help keep us on track and ground us in a way that burdens our need to always be thinking. When we are comfortable, we tend not to stray from these routines when we can help it.

Most of the time when we do, it is because we cannot help it.

Sometimes life throws us off the paved path for no reason other than because that’s just how life works. Sometimes we find ourselves downhill on a bush path we have no way of seeing or navigating through because it is entirely too unfamiliar. But since we must keep trudging, we go, blind or with limited visibility, stumbling and tripping or perhaps just walking straight on until we see the light. Others damn the consequences and go on breaking branches and twigs to forge their own path. Either way, we go on and try to find some semblance of where we’ve landed. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t.

There also might come a time when we find ourselves looking straight down the old path we took before life decided to tumble us down the hillside. However, by then we are older, different, or perhaps still the same but we’ve just gone the scenic route for a bit. Either way, the path can seem different, or the same. We may choose to go back and stay there, we may also go down and realize that it just doesn’t feel the same anymore. We could also just realize that maybe the original path wasn’t for us at all.

But on this day, Maria walked an old path she hadn’t been on in a while.

She was walking toward the lake, notebook now worn and edges slightly frayed in hand, off to an old haunt that she hadn’t thought of in a while. Life had kept her away for ages, and in all the chaos that happened, she simply forgot. But in that small corner of the world, it seemed like nothing changed. The cool air and timid sunshine rippled the lake water and made it glimmer just the tiniest bit, all picturesque and pretty as if to welcome her back.

She was a bit older now, definitely not the same as she was when she regularly spent her days here, but the familiarity of it all brought her warmth and comfort she didn’t know she missed. Even the squid’s appendages in the distance felt like a welcome back to an old memory.

Eventually, she found herself a comfortable-looking patch of greenery a little’s way from the lake’s edge. From there she could see the small birds that flew across the place, hear the occasional rustle from a small animal, and sometimes a schoolmate passing by. She took her seat, opened the notebook, and began writing again.

Today, she decided, would be a good day – or at least, better than the ones she’d had in a long time.