Out of the Canyons --pt. 3 (still March 29th)

My second night in Canyonlands Best Western Plus felt like being in purgatory; my sin was that I lavished in the perks of being back in civilization—the dryness, the warmth, the shelter, the luxury—and my punishment was to steep in a cocktail of self-admonishment and disgust for enjoying such things over the masterpiece of the wilderness.  I laid in bed for nearly an hour simply sorting out (trying to suppress) the feeling that maybe I wasn’t really the rugged mountain girl I make myself out to be.  The soundtrack of my battle with my conscious was the laughter of seemingly every family in the hotel, noisily splashing around in the pool just outside my room.  Every man, woman and child seemed hellbent on reminding me of all the family and friends who weren’t there to tell me that everything was going to be alright and that I had made the a good call.  However, I had no one but myself to comfort me, and I couldn’t seem to stop doing the opposite. 

Eventually the families got under my skin enough to prod me from bed.  I threw on street clothes over my dirt-caked skin—the shower was taken up by my dripping rainfly, which was hung up altogether too high for me to even consider the process of rehanging it after showering.  I pulled my mane of hair into a mangy ponytail, hopped along the obstacle course of drying equipment on my floor, and took off into downtown Moab a second time.


I found myself in a crowded Baja Mexican grill filled with even more families.  My abnormal party of one hardly garnered me any attention from the wait staff; I turned to my book for an entire forty five minutes before someone asked if my order had been taken—they apologized sincerely, brought me my food, cleared it, then proceeded to forget about me for another forty five minutes before asking if I wanted my check.  Even when I was talked to, they looked straight through me; I was a task to complete, intangible, simply an duty to be taken care of—a plate to clear, a water glass to fill.


I supposed it could be my solitude that obscured my existence to others—society doesn’t exactly acknowledge lone wolves, aside to reminisce on the occasional psychopath.  Not the worst theory.  Yet even in all my experiences as a lone wolf, I had still never felt so inconsequential.  Perhaps my surroundings were a part of it, but I began to wonder if this—just like everything else that had happened thusfar—had more to deal with myself than the world around me. 
 
Whether I was right or wrong in leaving the desert, the one thing I could be certain of was that I didn’t feel like I belonged in civilization at that precise point in time.  In choosing to think that, I’d manifested a reality.  I was doing this to myself; the world around me was being exactly how expected it to be.  This concept—the fact that we are capable of generating our own realities—seems so hard for us to wrap our minds around…  Yet it’s relatively widely accepted that every living person on this earth has their own individual perspective.  If you’re to argue the truth in that, as most would, then you might even say that we all live in our own, different realities.  If we all have our own realities, is it that far of a jump to say that you can change your personal one?  After all, what is reality in the first place, if not what we say it is?  If a human mind had not been there to think the concept up, there would be no such thing—the concept itself is, ironically, not real.  It is an abstraction of the human mind.  And in that moment, my personal abstraction was founded upon the fact I felt like my body was out of place in civilization; my shell was there, but my spirit wasn’t, and that hollowness made me good as invisible to the world around me.  I’d made it my reality.


The bland explanation, as ruled by general psychological theory, was that I was undergoing the process of psychological projection: casting my emotional predisposition onto the world around me.  However, I felt like it ran deeper than that—although we may have our own realities, that’s not to say we humans are attuned to one another’s.  I gave off the energy of what I was feeling, and those around me reciprocated it—a subtle conversation among subconsciouses.  I grinned a little more brightly at my waitress the next time she came by, but it was too late to reverse the effect.


I took my time signing the check and gathering all three of my belongings before meandering back to the hotel.  I took a few steps in, stripped off my pants, a few steps more, and flopped onto the bed.  For how intensely I felt I belonged in a sleeping bag instead of a plush bed, an inexplicable dread was building for my return to the wilderness.  Now that dinner was over, all that stood between me and the desert was the prolonged blink of sleep.  I’d already spent so much time building my pummeled sense of competency back up to a functional level—but what if I was really just kidding myself?  What if I was about to make the same mistake twice and have the desert shoot me down all over again?  Call me out on my lies?  Remind me that convincing myself I am capable doesn’t make it actually true?



To be honest, I was terrified.  I barreled through a few pages of my journal to get it up to date (to distract myself), diligently scrubbed my teeth and washed my face since I wouldn’t be getting the chance for a while (to distract myself), and buried myself in my book to see if I could gain some miracle insight (to distract myself).  After two hours of kidding myself, I curled up in the into a ball around my stuffed wolf—creatively titled ‘Wolfie’ by my younger self—kissed her on the forehead in the absence of someone there to do so to me, and slowly worked my way into an volatile sleep.