summer

these days will always be seen through a golden haze of sunlight shining off hair and dappled brown skin, green leaves and twigs find their ways everywhere. i am forever pulling them out of my hair, my clothes where they seem to love to gather, prickling me insistently, i am here, remember this time when? remember where that forest where you found me? remember the sting of nettles as you waded through them? my feet are brown and dusty, dirt ingrained in each whorl of skin, under each toe nail, connecting me to the ground, the earth, i am part of it and it is part of me and we are all one under the sun.

being.

a grey light comes over the room, sliding over the faces and bare skin of those sleeping bodies. we few left sit, being used as pillows, using sleeping people as cushions, quiet, lost in the calm that comes when you reach that place of intoxication where everything becomes so clear, like glass, and you know exactly what you need to do and who you are. someone says 'lets go for a walk' and though no one replies, slowly people begin to move, gathering shoes and blankets, hats and coats. before i go out the door i look at the kitchen clock, and it reads 5.27. the light is so indeterminate and unsure and i have been awake and away for so long that i am not sure whether it is am or pm. gradually we congregate outside the back door, some of us looking relatively normal, in coats and scarves, with matching shoes, others are wrapped in blankets, hats perched on their heads and odd shoes on their feet. it is so quiet.
the house seems to have grown out of the mist, trails and strands move around the edges, snake over the roof, i can see it billowing across the scrubby grass outside the house, but i can't feel the wind that is blowing it. a few metres away and i can't see anything but the house, even though it is in the middle of the country; usually you can see other houses in the distance, hear the occasional car, but now everything is deathly silent. it feels like we are the only people in the entire world. even the few sounds we make seem to be swallowed up by the fog. we start to walk, i don't know who sets off first, but there we are, straggling along in ones and twos, pale faced and sleep deprived, some of us already feeling the promise of the come down, and others still to whom that is hours off. the house fades out of sight, but i can feel it behind us, like it has just had a thin muslin curtain drawn over it. shapes swirl in and out of the mist, on the edge of my vision, and then fully apparent and floating past. i look around to see if anyone else can see what i am seeing, but everyone seems lost in their own world.
we go on and on until we get to a fence, and something stops us from climbing over. i look around and i see nothing, the world has ceased to exist. it feels like time has stopped and i am just being. nothing can touch me, i am aware so intensely of the fact that i am alive and thinking that nothing seems as if it could ever be as important as always knowing this: that i am alive, that there is something inside this body that transcends physicality, that cannot be placed, defined, labelled, controlled - i am wild and i am untamed and i, i, i, what is i? i think i can hear the gush of blood in my veins, the crackle of electric pulses in my brain, the many millions of messages that course through this structure, this creation, to make me walk, to make me be here, standing in this field, just being, just being.
people start to go back to the house, but i linger, feeling as if i could stand there forever, feeling myself be alive.