Three Miles, Grey-Green Silence

The cedar-scented silence arrived before I noticed I had stopped walking. Not silence exactly — the trail still held the soft collapse of my footsteps in wet duff, the occasional water-tick of something dripping through the canopy far above. But the cedars here were old enough to have absorbed the world, and whatever sound the mountain made beyond this bend, it didn't reach me. The light was the colour of lichen.

The air tasted like cold and bark and something mineral I had no name for. I had been thinking about her hands since the trailhead. Not thinking in any way I could have defended. More like carrying — the way you carry a bruise you keep pressing.

Her hands on the counter at the coffee shop, turning the cup. Her hands in her lap on the drive back, still for once. I'd watched them the way you watch something you are not allowed to want openly, which meant I'd watched them constantly and said nothing, and now I was three miles into Garibaldi with her hands still in my chest like a held note. The switchback opened a little here.

The trail bent left and a Douglas fir stood at the elbow of it, its bark deeply furrowed, rust-orange in the grey-green light. I stopped beside it. My dress — sage cotton jersey, light enough that the cold had been finding my legs through it since the second mile — pressed flat against my thighs in the stillness. I could feel the hem against the back of my right ankle.

The fabric was cool where it hadn't been against skin and warmer, almost damp, at the inner thighs where I'd been walking. I pressed my back to the fir. The bark was rough even through the dress. The cold of the trunk came through the fabric immediately, and I felt it at my shoulder blades and then at the base of my spine, and the contrast — cold bark, warm skin, the specific heat I was already aware of lower — made something in my stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the trail.

I looked up through the canopy. Grey-green, infinite, quiet. My right hand was at my side. I was aware of it the way you become aware of something that is about to move — a kind of pre-attention, the body consulting itself.

My left hand pressed flat against the bark beside my hip. I could feel the texture of it through my palm, the ridges, the cold. I thought: she will never know I am here. The exhale that came out wasn't planned.

It unfolded into the cedar air longer than I meant to give it, and somewhere in the middle of it my right hand found the hem of the dress — the cool edge of it against the back of my fingers — and I held it there. Just held it. The fabric between my knuckles and my thigh was a single thin layer of jersey. I could feel my own warmth through it, more warmth than the walking accounted for, warmth that had been building since the trailhead without my permission.

The silence pressed in.