Where Would You Go?

How long would you last in a cabin by yourself with no electricity and no running water, 205 miles from home? No work, no cell phone, no music, no dog, just yourself. What if you had committed to ten days; would you make it? As you feel the dull ache of loneliness at the exact moment you finish getting all of your stuff settled into the empty cabin would you stay? Every time you sit down to eat by yourself— no book, no magazine, no TV or phone, no conversation with a friend to distract you— you start to cry because you realize that the simple act of nourishing yourself breaks your heart wide open, would you pack your things and go? Every cell in your body is screaming for release from the sheer boredom and you aren’t sure how you won’t jump out of your own skin until you spy a stack of newspapers slated for the wood burning stove so you fervently start reading a two-year-old Wall Street Journal about how the yuan stumbled in China…then would you run away? You sit on your cushion to meditate, instead you find yourself planning your son’s third and fourth and fifth birthday parties as you reach for a pen and paper to make a checklist. Seemingly unable to do the one thing you came to this cabin to do, does that push you over the edge? If sitting quietly and watching the brilliant sunset over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains only makes you wish someone was there to share it with, which in turn brings up an intense rage from deep within, would you say, “Fuck this, I’m out of here!” Exhausted as hell from doing nothing all day you are unable to fall asleep. You just want to close your eyes and escape this wretched day but instead you find yourself sobbing… quietly so you don’t call attention to yourself from the creatures in the night who are thriving in these godforsaken woods by themselves. An urge you can no longer ignore continues to creep up so you put your jacket and shoes on and stomp loudly outside (because those coyotes you heard yelping at dusk were certainly headed in your direction). Pants around your ankles you squat and urinate, as your luck would have it, right on your shoe. As you pee and ponder this cosmic joke called life, something moves and catches your eye. You look up to the heavens to ask, “Why me? Why not somebody else?” right as the slowest shooting star in the universe traverses the entire night sky and erases all thought. You become aware of how brilliant and abundant the stars are. Your stars. Your galaxy. Your universe. The sheer beauty and magnitude render you a blubbering mess; pants down, on the cold rocky ground, bits of dried pine needles and red, clay dirt stuck to the tears on your face. So here you are. Completely and utterly unprepared to do this all over again tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. Would this be your breaking point?

Where would you go?