Alone


Dear Rita,

I’ve been waiting for a few days to find your way into the landscape alone, to disappear from sight for a while. I had made a rather elaborate plan to cycle and then walk in a place further away, to be certain you would not see people or cars. But funny how in the moment a plan can seem pointless.. 


You walk out of the house just as one would in the city. You open the kitchen door into the garden and then you just start walking further along the ridge of the hillside. If I said to you ‘the hill where the setting sun creates a line’ I think you would know the location I am talking about. You walk until you lose sight of any house and you know no one will encounter you and you know that you won’t encounter anyone. Suddenly a hare with long ears leaps out of the bushes and scrambles up the hill. (Later I find out that this is the Riverine rabbit, it is one of the most endangered mammals in the world, the main reason being that the female only produces one offspring per year.) As it disappears, the sun shines through its long ears and you wonder why it has developed such long ears?

There is no path on the hill that stretches out from the house into the distance and so you just have to walk through this rocky landscape, looking at the remains of a burnt place and at the same time a landscape slowly refreshing itself….so many tiny green plants living between the rocks. And you notice that you can hear the sea in the distance.

After about fifteen minutes of walking you lose sight of houses and a little further on, you find a perfect alcove of stones where you sit down. They’re a little sharp so you have to move onto the ground where a plant has become a ground cover, softer and easier for your butt.

This rocky landscape wherever you turn, gives you a kind of vertigo, harsh without any shelter. Maybe your survival instinct kicks in – if there was danger there would be nowhere to hide…  and then you question the desire to disappear. In this landscape you feel quite exposed and the ‘I’ of you seems to become louder, maybe more visible?

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