At the edge of the wood or the corner of the lake, she wished she could detach herself from everything and regard the world for what it was. She didn’t want to be attached. Attachment was blinding. But she didn’t want to embrace the stunning loneliness of the world either. She wanted to find the world within herself. At that instant, the heat of the moment and the chill of the night turned that absence into something.

---

Once she stayed still all day and up all night to watch the season change. That morning she had found the tree’s tiny bud much larger, and she knew it was upon us. She put her bag down, dropped her car keys and sat in the softening grass, legs folded beneath her. She stared at that bud, at all those burgeoning buds, all day--

and she still couldn’t catch it.

She didn’t fall asleep. Did she? No- She watched all night, a vigilant guard keeping nature’s truest secret. But it didn’t reveal itself to her.

It wasn’t sudden, for sure. How could it have been? She’d seen the videos, sped up, to show the transition. But it wasn’t gradual, either. No… it snuck up on you. It played it as if it had always been there, and we just couldn't catch it. Was it always there?

She missed it during her hike in the forest, when the dense thicket gave way to a wide glen. She stood at the edge, examined the grass. There must be a difference, she knew. But the green stood the same on either side, no strand of grass giving itself away.

So was it too, as the corner of the lake, where last summer we spent the days canoeing, the nights by a campfire. Wet mud between land and water, but no marking showing where it gave way to either end. The earth never changed, where it dried she did not know, where it slipped under the waters she could not tell.

And then, she wondered. Was the change even real? Maybe the reason she couldn't catch change was simply because it wasn't there to be caught in the first place. Maybe unity was everything, and any sense of division or separation was a mere human construct. How else could the earth keep its secret? How else could the world exist?