Seven AM, Cedar and Silence

The cedar gets into everything here. It comes through the cold air before she has walked a hundred metres — thick and resinous, older than anyone who uses this trail, older than the trail itself. She breathes it in and something in her chest loosens that she hadn't known was held.

Seven on a Tuesday in November. The park is empty in the way that only November manages: not the quiet of early morning, which is temporary, but the quiet of a season that has sent everyone indoors and intends to keep them there. She has counted the silences between sounds — the gap after a crow calls and before anything answers, the pause between her own footsteps when she stops to look up through the canopy at a sky the colour of old pewter.

She knows where she is going. She has known since she laced her boots at the trailhead, since she checked the weight of her pack and felt the specific density of what she'd tucked beneath her rain layer, wrapped in a dry bag she didn't need for anything else. The knowledge sits in her stomach, low and deliberate, the way a decision already made still asks to be made again.

The boulder is where she remembered it — set back from the trail, moss-covered, the rock face behind it angled just enough to brace against. She steps off the path without looking back. The cedar smell is stronger here, off the trail, where the ground is soft and dark and nothing has been disturbed.

She stands with her back against the boulder and waits.

Not for permission. Not for readiness. She is already ready — has been since the parking lot, if she is honest, since the zipper pull of her rain jacket caught the cold air and her stomach contracted with the particular anticipation she has learned not to name in polite terms. She waits because the moment before is its own thing, and she has learned to stay in it.

The silence between footsteps is complete. No one is coming.

Her right hand finds the zipper pull. The nylon shell is stiff under her palm, slightly tacky, and the zipper's rasp — when she pulls it, slowly, just enough — sounds enormous in the quiet. She stops. Listens. A crow somewhere. Then nothing.

The cold air reaches her through the opening. A narrow thing, that gap. Just enough.

Her left hand presses flat against the boulder behind her, the moss cold and giving under her fingers, the rock solid underneath. She can feel her own pulse in her palm against it.

She exhales — longer than she meant to, the breath unfolding into the grey air — and her right hand moves inside the jacket, and the cedar holds its silence around her like it has kept every secret this forest has ever been given.