Contentment

In the slight breeze, the tips of tree branches glide gently against each other, rustling in the forest. It’s the start of spring and, like every year for as long as you can remember, you are surprised by how loudly the robins sing in March. You follow the path as it diverges from and rejoins the small creek, the birds’ alto trills cascading down from above.

This forest, part of a small park not far from your small apartment, is not that large. And yet it’s impossible to contain it, to think of it as something that can be enclosed in physical or mental borders. You need places like this to remind you that there’s a difference between the world and the ephemera you reduce it to each day.

Later, as you make your way back home in the receding light, you try your best to internalize what it felt like to exist in the middle of so much life. To understand that this world you find yourself haunting is more beautiful than you can imagine, yes, but also wilder, more free. Irreducible. You arrive at the apartment with the robins’ still echoing in your ears. And as your ghost body glides up the stairwell, through the wall, and into the silent closet where you will linger amid hanging dress shirts, waiting for the apartment’s lone inhabitant to fall asleep, you taste the faintest spectral impression of something like contentment.