Long Thaw

Everyone has their demons, and everyone's demons mess with their heads in their own special way. With that, everyone also has their own way of fighting those demons. Some turn to creative outlets. Some turn to friends and families as distractions or for guidance. Some have to get outside to stop the turmoil happening inside.

Every morning, I wake before the sun. There's something about the air before it rises. Before even the birds and the world wakes, the air feels crisper, cleaner, like you can feel the pureness traveling through your body as you breathe it in. I put on my shoes, grab my jacket, and walk out the door. No matter how many times I do it, the drive to my favorite spot maintains my excitement, my yearning.

I make the final turn to the beginning of the trail and start my day off my favorite way. I only bring my keys with me as I start my way up. I need the space away from the world to just be with myself and that crisp, clean air.

Halfway through the trail, there's a point where it seems to break into two. I've only ventured to the right in the past, but each time, I stop to imagine where that other path would take me. It makes sense, honestly. I've asked myself that question my whole life, wrestling with the demons that tell me what my life could've been like if I had chosen another path. The path on the right is open, well-lit by the top half of the sun slowly making it's way up. The path on the left is almost completely covered by giant trees and shrubbery, but the snow acts as a natural light, allowing me to see through the branches a clear, dark path to something unknown. I always had assumed that wasn't a trail. There were no signs posted of its existence. The hundreds of times I've been this way in the past, I've never witnessed anyone venture that direction.

I took a deep breath and began again down my usual path, but something makes me hesitate. I'm a creature of habit, too high-anxiety most times to branch out and try something new and scary. I like the predictable, the comfortable. I like knowing. Call it the demons, call it inspiration or what have you, but I took slow steps towards the shady left path, terrified but enlivened at the thought of the unknown...

Although the sun had almost completely risen, the trees kept this path cold and dark. My heart was still racing as I made my way down the winding path. I jumped and froze as I heard a shuffle in the snow next to me. A deer jolted it's head up to stare at me, unmoving as we kept eye contact. A few moments later, it's body relaxed and bowed its head to continue foraging in the snow.

A few minutes had turned into an hour, and I saw ahead of me the light burrowing through the giant trees overlooking each side of the path at the top of the hill. When I reached the light, I gasped without thinking. I was met with a view of a giant frozen lake, surrounded by trees and piled snow with an unreal view of the mountains behind it.

Each morning after, I revisited this lake. I would sit on a fallen tree stump next to the water, close my eyes, and just breathe in that crisp air that made me feel alive. As the days past, the snow began to melt, the edges of the lake turning from ice to water. I watched the snow melt for months as summer creeped it's way through my new secret spot, and as I watched the lake thaw, I felt myself doing so too. I had spent so much of my life living in fear, anxious that something awful would happen to me again if I didn't stay within my own comfortable lines. This is what I needed, the reminder that new can be good and that the demons inside me shouting that I need the predictable are wrong.