UF PRISM

When I was young, I began obsessively repeating certain words in my mind, polishing the syllables like pearls – the first time, when I was seven, it was aneurysm. It was a comfort to me, the motion of stroking a beloved pet. Leishmaniasis. Rauschenberg. The first hike, it had been aliphatic, once between each agonizing step. 

Two miles, up a mountain, seventy pounds on my back – aliphatic, aliphatic, aliphatic. 

I spent my most valuable words on that mountain. In the real world, I fretted neurotically about how to speak to people – how to be funny, how to make people like me – but I hoarded the individual words, phrases, chunks of poetry, close to my chest. Trying to communicate felt, painfully, like tossing water at someone’s face to give them something to drink. But in Maine, the words I had saved up were the most precious things I had, and also the only thing I felt I knew how to give. 

Tonight I can imagine them so clearly as tangible things – cold, bright stars in the inky night, the empty lightness of my hands after releasing them. 

–

Every night in Maine I dreamt of clean, white urbanity. Often, I pictured a solid white wall, deliberately man-made and artificial, unridged by any sort of wind or rain, to fall asleep. In my sleeping bag at night, the hush of wind between the arms of the spruce and pine turned in dreaming into the rustle of my bed with another body in it, soft breathing, pain-cries and the love-cries too.

The vegetation discomfited my tropic-to-sub-tropic sensibilities. The ragged, thin arms of the paper birches and the low red alpine bushes were alien to me, as were the soft, loamy soil and moss-covered rocks. Even the fescue grass was too lush, too green, not real. 

On the seventh day, returning to the Field of Dreams felt like a movie scene taking place in heaven – how sumptuous it was! How cultivated! After so long in the great stomach of the brush, the clearing, the very existence of a clearing, which had been plowed and pulled and tilled by human hands, was almost an extravagance. 

But on the first day, swatting black flies from my face, the field was only the precipitous precursor of what was to come – the first and only visible stair down a darkened staircase. 

We sat, eleven, in a circle, on black foam mats, the dandruff of our luggage scattered behind us. 

“I’m excited,” Kate said, the round apples of her cheeks rosy with cold. “I love hiking.”

Lying between my teeth: “Yeah, me too.”

Kate, who hailed from Ocala (which to me meant farm-grown, grass-fed, though I was hardly enough of a city girl to think that) was freckled, apple-pie-pretty and bubbling over with sorority-girl-cheerfulness – which was not to say that she was not one of the most competent among us. I loved her very much, feeling, as I’m sure we all did, that mixture of chagrin and admiration one feels towards an older sister or a particularly maternal camp counselor. 

The empty packs, shriveled, waited to be filled with a packing list of synthetic shirts, wool socks, rain pants and jackets, other sorts of rural and colorful garb, and with tents and food bags. 

Remembering a conversation I’d had with Jaïm a month or so prior (“Prim,” he’d said, “I’ve already started resenting you. I’m pre-resenting you for all the weight I’m going to have to carry because you can’t.”) I dragged over a food bag that could have passably been full of rocks containing a fat bag of granola, a sack of milk powder, and several solid packages of tortillas. 

Full, I estimated my pack to weigh between sixty and seventy pounds. I tugged at a strap, trepidation lancing through me when it didn’t budge. 

Woe. I was the least athletic among us by a mile. My mother had joked that the Honors students were being sent on this trip to toughen our weak, intellectual bones, which seemed more a personal attack after learning that practically everybody else had played sports in high school, or lifted weights, or enjoyed being outside. Jaïm had joked that a large bird of prey would eat me before the week was up.

Unfortunately, by nightfall, it was clear I would survive. 

“I had this thought today,” I said, the blue glow of the artificial fire reflecting alien lowlight onto our faces, “That even if I can’t do it, I must.” Anxiously, I dipped my head. I had been the slowest hiker, lagged behind by twenty feet, had gone numb from the hips down with pain. Dispensing platitudes felt presumptuous, if anything. To my surprise, the group murmured in assent, and I flushed. 

At first, I hadn’t been able to even get my pack on. I wasn’t able to do it myself until the second to last day when all the food had been eaten, eleven-times-three-meals-a-day pounds of it. Jaïm lifted the pack for me easily, and I slipped into it as though I were a coat hanger – “I’ve gotcha, buddy,” he said. 

I was slightly humiliated that I needed the help, like a small child, but was soon cheered by someone else asking me to untie their water bottle off of their pack for them. I resolved to offer what little I could, fumbling items out of zipped pockets with my numb fingertips and undoing carabiners. I was reminded, acutely, of my deficiencies: I was as small and pink and blind as a newborn mouse. Oh, to have the power to turn back the clock and develop skills in something more useful! I couldn’t even French braid, though I was glad to be of use when Paul asked me to do an ordinary one.

With Andrew at the lead, all our packs on, we were off – a motley, clanking crew of Florida transplants in the remote Maine wilderness, trundling like mules over moss and rock.

The terrain grew steadily more alien. As the path steepened, great exposures of blue-black shale, damp with rainwater, revealed itself from the dead leaves. The ground was bald and slick, and the appearance of moss, in discrete, ragged patches, became shocking in its organicness.

Without us, the forest might have sounded almost like nothing – we saw almost no wildlife while we were there, and the aspen and birch simply held onto sound. Leafy, deciduous silence. Maybe the dripping of water. But instead, our persistent steps were punctuated by songs and laughter – at one point, a confusingly macabre rendition of The Ants Go Marching Two By Two ensnared us for half an hour (“The ants go marching five by five… Uh… At the top of a building, one takes a dive… Yikes, the ants go marching four by four, hoorah! Hoorah!”). 

When the song died, I turned to Paul, who walked at a similar pace. “I feel like this is like – uh, do you know the story about Scheherazade?”

He said he didn’t. 

“Okay, so it’s actually not like this at all, but it is? There’s a version of it that’s, like, about a computer program, so I’ll tell that one to you.” (Paul was a computer engineer.)

I continued, “There’s a starving college student, relatable, who desperately wants to be rich, and one day he invents a super high-fidelity simulation program that’s just like real life. And he runs a scenario where he wins the lottery when he graduates and becomes wealthy. The thing is, when he runs the simulation, he realizes it computed way more than he thought – in it, the simulation version of him also fantasized about being rich, and also created a simulation where he wins the lottery. He sees it goes, like, hundreds of layers deep, where every version of him in each simulation that won the lottery was making simulations of himself winning the lottery.

And then, surprise, when he graduates, he wins the lottery, even though he doesn’t remember buying a ticket.”

Paul looked nonplussed. “Is this like the riddle where you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler because it creates a new timeline?”

I laughed. “No, I think I didn’t tell the story right. It’s about how if you tell enough stories, stories about stories, you can put yourself inside of one. And Scherazhade did that in the original story. She nested herself inside of stories she told about girls escaping danger and getting free to… I guess, statistically increase her chances of being in a story like that herself, if that makes sense.” 

I had been thinking about the beauty of the scene – all eleven of us, trampling forth in the weak gold light, had reminded me of a line from one of my favorite poems: The horses running until they forget they are horses… Then, suddenly, of the listlessness of the poem’s opening, where the speaker commands to be told a story about a dream, and being struck, suddenly, by the desire to tell a story myself.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s okay.”

–

After several hours, Andrew, remarkably put together in his cargo pants and black sweater (looking for all the world like an advertisement for REI Co-Op), showed no signs of slowing down.

“He’s like a pack animal,” Iona said wearily during one of our brief stops, leaning backward onto a rock for support. “He just wants to keep going.”

I made a noise that would have been laughter, except I was physically unable to exert the energy. I was having my own trials. As the hours passed, my world narrowed to a single point of pain and the trancelike movement of my legs without direction, where nothing else existed outside of the next step forward. 

The effect was purgatorial – simultaneously punishing and purifying. The repetitive motion gave my mind soft clarity, like the hum of an aquarium filter. Somehow, it became deeply necessary to be so far removed from my true life. Images that drifted briefly into my consciousness of a hand on the ensellure of my back under pulsing strobe lights, thin blue light from a laptop screen, and morning sun pooling on my white bedsheets seemed like a faraway dream. 

The dream was of something else now: one foot in front of the other. 

On some level, it was freeing to be reduced to such physicality. My body held a tense rope to itself, feeling the solidity of my own flesh and aperture, everything gaspingly tangible. 

I fell, once, snagging on a tree root, and a ringing, exhausted terror that I wouldn’t be able to get up again shot through me. The pain kept my legs stiff, as if bolted with iron rods, but I staggered up again, and our campsite was only over the hill. 

I had endured. Night came sweet and low as molasses, and I hated myself for my uselessness, my slowness. The tents smelled damp and of day-sweat, like the floor of a gym. Someone, ingeniously, had hung a headlamp from the internal tent pole, and the light shook with our arrival, a bustle of four orange sleeping bags and us with our socks on. 

When the light clicked off, the only sound was a disembodied laugh floating up from the neighboring tent, the ghostly murmur of distant conversation. No cicadas. When the laughter died, I could hear the trees whispering against each other. 

A hush in the tent, but no one was asleep.

“Do you know any poems, or anything?”

A voice came out of the dark from my left, a question that could have only been meant for me. The night felt gigantic all around us, as if it had flooded into the tent. Briefly, I couldn’t shake the sensation that we had gone away to sea on a ship, out into a foreign blackness.

I hesitated. “Sure.”

“You do not have to be good,” I recited, “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

The words came out with the cadence of a lullaby, as if I was the one listening rather than speaking. 

I continued, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” 

As I kept speaking, the words seemed to reach the same frequency as the ambient sound of outside, dissolving as soon as they left my mouth. I remembered the last time I had recited this poem aloud, a nothing summer afternoon in my childhood bedroom, drenched in sunlight, the plain white plaster of my walls transforming into the rich, layered yellow-cream of oil paints, and I was there again, warm from the sun. 

– 

Towards the end of the week-long journey, there was a meadow I can’t forget. There are photos of it, but the analog camera missed the clear afternoon light shining through the blades of grass, backlit into an impossibly pale shade of green, and the stark, glittering beauty of the single heap of snow in the center, impossibly circular, like the face of a mirror. There was a stream nearby, and when I stood in the meadow, imagining that there had never been anything besides it, I could hear its soft blank noise. In the next story I tell, I’ll go back there.