One Week In

“You could die up there and no one would know, for like, days,” Noelle says to me after our long night out in BigCity, NC. We’re discussing the hike up, how I’ll be doing it alone at about two in the morning, and how I’ve got twenty pounds of groceries to carry while I’m at it.

But I want to tell her, oh the clusters of trillium in the afternoon light, the peach of sunrise over the grey hills, the splash of the spring water always reminding me how much this mountain has to give. Life is sustained here, I can see it and feel it and breath it and slowly, I’m becoming a part of it. It’s been one week on Fork Mountain and already I think I am in love. If I died up here, the mountain would know first and maybe that’s all that counts.