Day 8 – (swipe left) This morning I escape to the moors equipped with a map, though I might have done better to keep to verbal directions. “Past the sheds and up the hill to the stone steps.” Wayfinding for the right brain. I am on another planet or the only woman on earth. Somehow, I’ve missed the Pennine Way and have stumbled onto a bridle path that mysteriously drops into nothing at a mucky impasse. Blue skies gaze back from pooled circles. I venture a hop, one step to a mossy mound, and feel an ominous shift beneath me. Where have all the horses gone, after all? The way of apocalypse and a bottomless sky. Feathers litter the ground and the iridescent flash of a wing, but nothing more. The rest of the body gone missing like the trail. This walk has already stretched further than planned and still a return trip awaits. So much to do today, so much owed and no desire to pay. A shrill cry and a grouse takes flight. Lead the way! I’ll weave wings of dry grass, fashion a crown of heather and rule this open terrain in the name of all things wild. We’ll sleep in a nest of sedges and reeds, until explorers sail to us from another star. “Welcome! Watch your step! We prefer flight here.” My stomach rumbles and the spell of the wild rumpus breaks. On the long way back, I meet up with Bryan, a retired architect, and his black lab who is afraid of yellow. No brick roads or buttercups for him. “Maybe you are more suited for flight!” We talk about Sylvia and her disposition, Bryan reminds me that Ted was a mean one and suggests I make Plath’s “Mirror” into a song. Back at the cottage, I google the poem and with it, find this from her, “Somehow, I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older.” I gaze into the mirror and recognize the sky on my skin.
West Yorkshire – Day 8 The sky on my skin.
