Discovering Alone Time
Karen Kalbacher

The first day of my unemployment started with guilt. Chris had to go to his job sick as a dog and I was going to the park. I had promised my brother a piece of original art and I was going to photograph it in Penny Pack Par. In my heart I know what section of the park I want. I wan the waterfalls. Unfortunately I don't remember where they are and this was my second trip into the woods. I parked still thinking about how tired and sick my boyfriend was but something left me when I caught a glimpse of the empty playground at the edge of the wood.

Armed with my digital camera and a blue sweater Heather had left at my apartment, I raced to the swings as fast as my inappropriate footwear would allow-I wasn't smart enough to pack sneakers so I was destined to walk the woods in my stiff clogs. Leaves crackled around me smelling crunchy if that's possible and dusty like dry dirt.

I abandoned every thing civilized and climbed onto a swing with a deep hole scored out of the dirt beneath it, imagining the hundreds of times feet had been used as brakes. I sat there for several seconds feeling silly, young and I started to swing.

The wind was loud and whisking leaves off the large trees around me. A feeling crept over me. I was alone, all alone. Not alone in the lonely way like when you're the only one you know at a party, but truly alone. The air was heavy with quiet. The leaves in the wind sounded like a thousand bugs running over one another's backs but it didn't make my skin crawl. I felt as if society was a shell I could cast off in a dead playground and walk far away from it.

I swung back and forth free of a job and responsibilities for the first time in a long time. I could swing for minutes or hours it didn't matter. Each second made me feel more alive, more free and almost taller, un-weighted? But eventually the empty paths called to me and I stopped and let gravity drag me down until my shoes scraped the earth. I was stopped. I walked to the path. It was hard cement and wrong underneath my feet. I took my first picture of the wood s around me. I let the grass and underbrush lure me away from the path and farther into the illusion of honest wilderness.

Water dragged me farther down into the woods. I could hear it then see it farther down in the trees and then I was walking from grass to mud to sandy mud to sand and finally staring out from an outcrop of thick gray rocks into thick gently moving waters. My camera caught a few nice scenes although I had to adjust my view to cut out some garbage and a lost tire caught forever in the sediment of the creek. Forgetting to return to the path, I traversed low lying branches and rocks, getting as close to the water as I dared. I would survive a little wetness but I doubted my camera would and I was on a mission for my brother. But I did go as far out on the outcropping of rocks to capture a group of geese posing for me in a little farther down the creek.

The farther I walked from the path the more alive I felt. The more I enjoyed the breezed and the eerie quiet. I felt like an animal released from the zoo, happy but not exactly sure what to do, where to go. I wandered until I was forced by the thickness interwoven branches and the rough vines to turn away from the water and back up through the grass and tree stumps to the path but a man and his dog was there. I felt shy like a squirrel and waited. I didn't want to be seen. I wanted to enjoy my aloneness for a while longer. It was a curious freedom. I had no duties or obligations to him. I was just one more squirrel in the shade of the trees.

I walked the trail until the cement path widened out onto a highway. I still hadn't found the water falls. I stopped at the edge of the woods and leaned on a rail that led back down into the woods. I was close to racing back off into the underbrush like a wild thing. I stayed there and stared until a woman was walking down the street. Fearing she might turn from the sidewalk into the woods I turned back. I knew time was catching up with me and again I didn't want to waste my time smiling at strangers making noise in my woods.

I walked the path back and came across a dead mouse in the center of the cement. I checked to see if it was truly dead and saw the pain I felt everyday going to my job in its tiny brown eye. That pure desolate sadness was the death stare of a tiny wild corpse. Using my camera, I snapped a picture to remind myself that that kind of pain was avoidable in life but unavoidable in death. I wanted to remember the mouse, the look.

Constrained by the path at every turn I felt the need to race away off of it into the mud, the grass, the trees, and the vegetation, anything to be free. I've felt like that my entire life, constrained by the route society set for me as a woman and a worker and a basic person. As I closed in on my car I was disappointed to see my dead playground invaded not by laughing children but by people searching for treasures in the dirt. Again I hid, this time behind the trunk of a tree, reluctant to let go, angry at their invasion of my silent world.

Eventually I reached my car and a weight, familiar and near constant, settled back over my shoulders. Responsibilities loomed, new jobs loomed, new burdens loomed and I sighed. My alone time was over. I was a member of society again, no longer alone but maybe just a little bit lonelier.

Check out my old column: Underwhelming Yourself