Because, another one? Already? If a nurse was needed, I was a nurse. If a porter was needed, I was a porter. A scribe, a janitor. An undertaker. And no one ever said, Gee. Gee, this isn’t what you signed up for at all. This makes no sense at all. Down is up. I didn’t want to be called a hero. I wanted someone to acknowledge my moral injury.

Everybody’s got a reason to hike the trail. It’s never because they are well loved and at peace.

“I was wondering. In plant life, is there any equivalent of a familial relationship?” he asks. “Do plants grow near one another out of sheer convenience, or by design?” She rubs her runny nose. “Are plants attracted to each other? Is that what you’re asking?” “I suppose so.” “Well,” she says. “Plants are touching underground, through their root

It had been such a long night. One of the longest of her long life. Her mind was normally a hearthside—a home. Throughout her life, being alone was being intact. She cannot bear the suggestion that her mind is unsafe, a wild place where she wanders, a subject.

She has been called, in various registers of respect, an “original,” a “square peg,” and “an acquired taste.” She felt no indignation when she’d overheard two fellow residents in her retirement community discussing her recently in the solarium. “I like Lena,” one had said. “I mean, in the abstract.”

We start to walk down the tote road together. She understands my need to pace. For my part, I am suddenly, urgently in need of a friend. I want to talk, but at the same time, I fear that an innocent inquiry into my well-being might cause me to collapse, like a detonated building.

Rested, relieved, you look for the path. Ten steps, twenty. Nothing. But the path was right there. You don’t backtrack. Lost people seldom do. Rather, you push on farther, because you are dead certain this is the direction you came from. Every direction you turn, the view is identical, a claustrophobic wall of foliage and shrubbery.

Every human being imagines, but few disclose. Children are quick to share their strangest thoughts and inventions. They cease to do so only after the shaming or baffled reactions of adults, portraits of which the child hangs on her inner walls, until at last, she closes the gallery.

But every time I was on the verge of quitting, every time I made peace with the decision to quit, to say goodbye to my “tramily” and wish them well and walk away and find some feather bed and be done with it, I’d reach the next shelter just as the woods were growing rosy with dusk, and somebody on the same journey would be building a campfire, the