how could you believe that i am surrounded by flames when my body shows no evidence of char? 

how could you be cognizant of my depleting oxygen levels when you are unsighted to the smoke in my lungs?  

you can’t. it is invisible to you.

you witness my body remain evidently mobile while my veiled skeleton remains motionless.

i survive by shallow breaths as they find their way through to me. the air retreats from my body as quickly as it enters, a prolonged lapse between each one rejecting what is purposed. 

i am engulfed as the thermal sensation intensifies although my atmosphere remains arctic; a substantial ambivalence. my body aches from standing void of access to any possible egress.

grief is unpredictable. loss is incurable.

there is a border now between who i once was and how i subsist now.

i still endure within my body but my brain has traveled to a place so unusual.

the walls here are unfamiliar, freshly painted and foreign. 

it appears as if i relocated to a nonnative land where i do not speak the same language as those surrounding me. i am unsettled, alienated, and without a map to navigate.

i am lost.

i often speak about being in search of a bridge, one that connects my old self to this new version of me today, and i have perpetually presumed that bridge would be made up of people. i thought that i needed familiar faces recalling stories of who i once was in order to resurface my mind and feel a sense of normalcy, but i was wrong.

my self integration immutably aligns with ponderosa pine and the reverberation of raven wings in a tranquil sky. it’s dirty feet, packed tents, and immersive exploration. it is self awareness for my surroundings, innovativeness for what’s momentarily accessible to me, and it is an alliance with an environment that i love.

my bridge has always been biophilia.

in order to find myself again i need to be myself again. i cannot be elevated on a viaduct to reconnect myself, i need to stay on the ground. 

i would like to look up at the canyons that once made me feel alive and believe that we are similar. i’d like to think that one day my grief parallels their hydraulic erosion, that my foundation can indefinitely collapse and i too can mechanically break down yet still be left with a structure that holds purpose. 

thus as the flames remain, i stay stagnant in a state of torpor as if to resemble the australian echidnas in the blaze of warrumbungle national park. the person i once was may still be dormant as my sympathetic nervous system remains deactivated, but if she has the periderm i recall her having then i know she’ll find her epicormic resprouting.