Trailhead
If you could find the key to my heart, what would it look like?
It would look like a drop of water, the way that a beech leaf falls down to the earth in autumn.
If you could hold the key to my heart in your hand, what would it feel like?
It would be sharp, the way that a pinecone hurts your entire palm in your hand and feels so light but fills up so much space in its weightlessness.
If you could bring the key to my heart close to your face and take a deep breath in, what would it smell like?
It would smell of pine, of burnt branches, of sweet honeysuckle, of smoke and dried sandalwood.
The sun is out today, and I am on the path again. My stomach grumbles for more trail mix, which I’ve forgotten in the glove compartment of a tiny red car that sleeps patiently at the trailhead, waiting for us to descend down the ridge.
Everyone else is a hundred feet behind me, except for my one trail buddy: a Goldendoodle who keeps wandering off the path and runs circles all around me until he trots back to my side, his tongue hanging off of the side of his mouth, as though he were simply too happy to pull it back in.
There is something comforting about being the hiker in the front. You start to see things that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) otherwise if you were buried deep in a conversation, or caught up in turning your head to make eye contact with someone else. You start to hear things that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) otherwise: how loud the silence is way up high in the mountains, the sound of the crunch of leaves and the mournful, weeping wind. When it’s only you in the front, you have the freedom to look at other things. The freedom to think about other things.
You start to remember things that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) otherwise.
The woods have held my secrets ever since the I walked in them years ago.
The first time I told them a secret, I was four years old. My parents and I piled into our compact grey car that we had bought used for a two thousand dollars and was falling apart as it wheels creaked beneath and the plush seats came apart at the seams. But to me, it was a spaceship that took us far away from the city and into the Shenandoah Valley. My father drove us out into the Appalachian Mountain range, and our rocket wove through the bends and turns of the winding Blue Ridge Parkway, with no stoplights and all systems go.
We pulled over at every scenic view, unbuckle our seat belts, and peek our heads over the single stone wall that stood between us and a cerulean landscape between us. We drove through the highway until we saw signs for a trailhead nearby. My father dumped water bottles and granola and sweaters into a backpack and we would begin climbing up whatever was in front of us: rocks, ridges, rolling hills that took us to the very top of a mountain peak.
By the time we got to the top, we were all out of breath. We inhaled and exhaled deeply, the cold autumn air filling our lungs up with the promise of snow in a few months. I whispered to the trees around me, telling them all the things that I wanted to be and wanted to do. I told them my secrets, and trusted them with my fears.
But the trees never said a word in reply. Instead, they listened quietly, their branches waving themselves in acknowledgment like an old friend you pass on the sidewalk, their roots digging deep into the earth to embrace me, their leaves nodding in agreement with me, before finally sweeping my secrets away with the fall breeze.
The trail is hard to follow in the October sunshine.
Sometimes, it is so obvious and straight: easy to see in front of you. It feels impossible to miss with bushes and branches cleared away from its path, with rocks lining the dirt road that winds its way up the ridge in such an indisputable way, so that no one could ever question which step you’re supposed to take next.
But today, the trail is loosing itself within its surroundings. The lines are starting to blur, the edges are beginning to blend into the woods around me. The white trail markers are difficult to spot against a sunny sky (difficult still when the wind tosses my hair in front of my face).
It has been years since I last walked on this path — the last place hundreds of miles south of where I am walking on it now — and I know that I have never seen these trees before. But somehow they already know my secrets, as if the trees from years past have whispered along all the things I’ve never told anyone else and now this forest knows all the things that I once said out loud as a child.
As I walk, I feel something soft brush beside me: my trail buddy wags his tail and brushes his head beneath my hand, which as been swinging back and forth as I’ve hiked downhill. I look up and, between the locks of my hair, see a wave of leaves being plucked from their branches, and swirly around above me, in front of me, until they finally fall down below me. They have nothing to cling to, nothing to hold on to, and are completely boundless: unlimited by all the places that they could fly away to.
They carry secrets and can do what I still cannot bring myself to: surrender to everything around them, having faith that they will fall in the right place.
If you could find the key to my heart, where would it be?
It would be buried beneath all the fallen leaves, beneath the roots of Poplar tree, beyond the trailhead. It would be in a place that sets you free.
