The Girl Who Lived in the Woods

My parents didn’t understand my reluctance to call myself a doctor. “You got the degree, you should introduce yourself as Dr. Jones,” my mother said on my graduation day in May with my father nodding emphatically beside her. She’d repeat the sentiment twice more, during the bi-weekly video calls I’d reluctantly agreed to, as I knew how concerned they were about my safety (ha!). She’d dropped the subject once I reminded her that there was no one to even talk to where I was. Those calls came to an end on The Solstice, but so did a lot of things.

My parents just weren’t the right age to understand why, “Hello, name is Dr. Iriana Jones,” sounded wrong on so many levels, or why people would make a whipcrack sound when I said those words (Like a magical spell. [Oh hush.]). Nevermind the fact that when you say you’re a doctor people think you mean a medical doctor, not a PhD in Music or Norse Eddas or Archaica. God forbid someone has a heart attack and everyone turns to you with an expectation that you can do something, that you can help, and you have to explain that you’re a doctor of the French horn or something. (What are you now? [shut up.])

My parents didn’t realize that the raucous applause as I walked across the stage to be handed my degree was sarcastic (They applaud you now for real.). “Archaica” was a meme major to anyone who considered their degree more worthwhile. Yes, I made it up, but so did The Nudism Guy (He drowned [himself.]) I thought it was about academic freedom, and so did the school. The heads of the anthropology, philosophy, and technology departments loved me. They’d come sit by my fire and talk for hours. With my degree in hand, I hugged them each and they all said I smelled nice (For once. [For once.]) Their applause was real, but to the student body I was a joke (They thought The Nudism Guy was a joke. [He was. {They thought The Skizz Guy was a joke. <How did we live without it?>}]). My parents never got it. (Who’s laughing now? [Not me.])

My parents thought I was respected on a grander scale than was true and I pitied them for their ignorance. I know they did their best, but they were unprepared (Everyone was unprepared in the end! [No, not everyone]). They didn’t understand that I was part of this academic pantheon right alongside The Nudism Major, The Tech-Bro Steroid Guy, and The Guy Who Invented Skizz (How did we live without it? [It was among the hardest things to give up, yes.]). I was The Girl Who Lived in the Woods.

My parents didn’t understand that rumors about me had spread far and wide before I chose a school at which to pursue (Be allowed to pursue…[Be allowed to pursue.]) my PhD. Of course, I knew little of this, cut off as I was, but it all came clear in the end. They were the not-quite ivory towers that espoused a wide range of academic freedom as the perfect destination for studies that are a little more than outside the box (They’re outside the cube.) People who care to snicker at certain types of scholarly whimsy knew there was a girl who, allegedly with every manner of insurance and waiver in place (Thanks to her rich parents. [Thank you. {They should all be thanking them now!<They should all be thanking them now, yes.>}]) had been living as if she were moving backward in time.

My therapist says I need to “simplify” and stop using so many parenthetical notations. I’m sorry, but this is all for my own edification, no one else’s.

I was an in vitro surrogate GMO of a baby, which is why I believe I turned out like I did. By the time the rumors really caught fire I was living a medieval life, reluctantly allowed to burn oil in lieu of using electricity in my dorm room, only after signing an unfathomable amount of paperwork (Remember the Safety Pledges? [Yes.]). I mostly ate mutton cooked over a fire in the parking lot and made bread in an earth oven on the pitchers mound, as there had once again been a lack of interest in baseball among the student body. I grew wheat in the outfield, but was required to purchase meat from a butcher (One step at a time.) My final project that year was an illuminated manuscript journaling my experience. My dissertation was carved in stone (The first page, at least.)

My parents were frustrated with the way I hopped from school to school, and grew impatient more than once with how long it all took. At least I know that their May smiles were genuine. True pride and relief as I walked across the stage (I hate the shoes and hardwood! [It’s unnatural now.]) After that it was just relief when I’d call. They always wanted to know how long this part was going to take, even though I told them time and time again about the $10,000 grant and how I’d leased land from a town for four years to live in their forest and conduct a Paleolithic lifestyle. I had all the appropriate hunting licenses and insurances thanks to a fundraiser boosted by The Skizz Guy (Love The Skizz Guy! [Thank you, Skizz Guy, I hope you’re okay.])

My parents did understand that the nearby townspeople were apprehensive and standoffish, which worried them. I reminded them that they were also apprehensive, but not to worry. The Skizz Guy had his lawyers draft up a very solid contract regarding both mutual expectations from this arrangement and ironclad clauses regarding my ability to defend myself from all threats “of nature and human nature,” loaded with words like “impalation,” “crushing forces,” and “toxic and/or poisonous natural substances.”

I was never too worried, I could smell them from a mile away when they’d enter the forest. I’m not one of those people who say high tension wires make them sick, or they’re allergic to laundry detergent. There’s no medical reason for me to be the way I am, I just don’t like that stuff. The smells and sounds and lights overwhelm me, I’m sensitive. Power lines are ugly (Unnecessary! [Yes, that’s evident now. {It’s always been evident!}]) and laundry detergent just smells bad. They can call it “Spring Breeze Lavender” but some primitive part of your brain recognizes it as a phony, a disrespectful counterfeit imitation of God’s grandeur existing in the uncanny valley of human perception.

It took them six months to run out of chemical cleansers, and after that I’d smell their unified animal stink. After the night lit up with psychedelic fire that lasted through the daylight I dismantled my lowland camp and moved full time into Camp D, a cave in the mountains, which they still haven’t found (They respect you now.) I don’t know why I brought the box with the phone in it, instead of leaving it buried under the rock (Hope. [Hope.]) I climbed to the top of the mountain each night that the sky burned and laid out naked on a rock basking in the cosmic conflagration.

My therapist reminds me that now, after all (after all) everybody calls me “Doctor Jones,” when they see me and they say it with legitimate happiness. I’m supposed to recognize that and bask in it like it’s some sort of sunlight I can photosynthesize to feel better about things. As if. The worst part of all this is that I was fine before. Being off the grid suited me (obviously [obviously]). So much time and effort went into fending it off (the grid), trying to not get swallowed up by keeping my phone in a lockbox and only hiking out far enough to catch a cell signal once a week, that I never imagined my little oasis could grow large enough to swallow them up (All of them [All of them.]). Teaching them to make soap was the first real gift I gave them.

It bothered my peers that I refused to keep in contact by text, but that was nothing new, it was one of the reasons I’d had so few friends in high school. It bothered my professors that I insisted on handing in handwritten copies of everything, but such was the scope of my project. I was told it was all a waste of time, not just learning how to do all that stuff, but bothering to do it. They didn’t understand my needs. We could bond over Skizz, but eventually even that fell by the wayside, and by then there were so few threads connecting me to any of them.

I knew what it meant when the sky lit up on The Solstice. Though it may be a particularly modern problem, I was aware of what a Carrington Event was, as it had long been a fantasy of mine that the sun would blast the earth with particles and kill all the technology by inducing damaging electrical fields in anything that ran on batteries or plugged into the wall (You caused it!). However, I was unaware of what such a reality would mean for me. I thought it would be a great equalizer, bringing everyone to my level. I didn’t realize how they’d reach out in their sudden neediness, dragging me down to their level.

I crept out and spied on them many times during that first nine months. The skins I wear blend well into the landscape as they were crafted by God’s loom. I saw how they were suffering, but could not muster a single shred of pity when I saw how many deer they killed that first summer. The sheer waste of meat and carcasses left to rot filled me with anger like I’d never felt before. Even before The Solstice I’d felt that they deserved some catastrophe, that they’d earned it by growing soft and reliant on things they could never make themselves. I’d neglected to consider how humans are a catastrophe that nothing deserves. I swore then to never help them, but such are promises made on the wind (You should have let them rot! [Oh hush.]).

They called out to me when the sickness came. I heard their cries from afar and descended from the mountain. I must’ve looked a wild thing to them (You are!) but they were respectful and called me “Dr. Jones.” I showed them which plants were antiseptic and which would reduce a fever and they thanked me for helping their children.

It turned out that my regression was actual progress. The people looked dumbfounded when I suggested they plant cotton, that they should be grateful it will even grow at this latitude thanks to climate change, that the catastrophe of humanity had granted them at least this. That was in the spring, nine months after The Solstice. So many of them had died before I made contact, but Nietzsche said “Hope is the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torment of man” and they were in the grip of the worst type of hope (They still are.)

The people didn’t understand how bad it was until the soap-making lesson. I had every man, woman, and child in town present for the demonstration when it dawned on me that they still thought things would soon be fixed. They’d seen the fire in the sky, and it had thrust their lives into darkness, but did not realize its significance. I’d had to explain to them that the length and intensity of the storm meant that not just the things were broken, but the things that make the things are broken and so are the things that make the things that make the things. It took a year for that to finally sink in. I think they finally understood when I taught them how to build a loom with hand tools. That was after I taught them how to build spinning wheels and worm-drive cotton gins. I told them if they wanted steam engines they’d have to figure that out on their own (They still haven’t.)

I must point out that while everyone else was popping pills and going to therapy year after year, I didn’t need to talk to anyone about my mental health until after I got reintroduced to society, if that’s what this is.

When I talk about “God,” I don’t mean what you’re thinking of. My god is an amalgam that doesn’t exist in any book, that wasn’t programmed into my mind by anyone. It’s just what I saw once I’d peeled away all the distractions and I will not apologize for reaching that point in my teens while the rest of you had your eyes pointed elsewhere, but that’s what I did. If you just stopped with all the noises both inside and outside your head and listened you’d hear the heartbeat just like I do, but I know for a fact that you can’t hear anything over the sounds of your own voices. If you just shut up, you’d hear it. (They’re hearing it now.)

You think you are made in God’s image as if He is some bearded white man in the sky, but that’s just another fugazi. You are made in God’s image in that everything you behold is such. The Sun is more of a god than any of your fairy tales and demiurges. It is the font of chaos at the center of creation spiraling out expressed in everything from your DNA to the branches on trees. It is the quantum yin yang (yin yang [yin yang {yin yang <yin yang>}]) spiraling all the way down to infinity, and you can bask in this and photosynthesize wonders out of your faith. Most people were just too busy to ever do that, but they’re learning now and things are changing (Your spells forced them to change. [Oh hush.])

John Donne said, “No man is an island,” but I am no man, I am an island in a sea of time. That was always good enough for me, and while the whole world suffered through a “loneliness epidemic” during a time of unprecedented connectivity, I never felt alone for even a moment (You were never alone. [I was never alone.)]. It turns out you don’t need much to survive. I went through great lengths to prove that (You are insane! [You are.]).

The so-called Stoned Ape Theory suggests that people lived in caves until they began ingesting certain psychedelic mushrooms and substances. It posits that these mind-expanding experiences allowed them to conceptualize and create such concepts as language, math, architecture, and agriculture. (They need it again. (They’re not ready. {They are.}]).

My Therapist says all that is about touching the mind of God, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s about tuning into what you thought was unknowable, but was right there all along. There are a million ways to tap into that divinity or the collective unconscious that bridges the gap, but until The Solstice ended all the binging and bonging and background music no one could see it (Now they do. [Now they are starting to. {Help them along! <No. (Yes!)>}]).

Today is The Solstice again (How many now? [Too many.]) and, as they do every year, the people will gather under the night sky to watch (To hope.) that the hand of God will reach out again, but this time restore things to the way they were. This is their new faith (Help them, the bounty awaits. [I don’t have to decide today {They trust you, Dr. Jones.<I know. (You know where they will be.)>}]).

I will take these papers (Ugh. [We have all had to make sacrifices.]) and read them to my therapist, who waits standing in a field below the mountain. After a long embrace, I will rest my back against my therapist’s rough trunk and the wind will carry my words up and away through the leaves.