We stand inside a stump’s stomach and meditate. My color wispy white, like cloud tails that mustache the mountain faces.

Boots on a forward tilt crushing wet redwood. She says, between deep breaths, “I’m not feeling … anything … but my biology.” Woken just an hour ago from our green symbiote moss mattress. We dance across a fallen trunk bridged atop the river.

The forest doesn’t apologize for its fallen trees; nature isn’t orderly. I don’t apologize for my chipped teeth.

Even amid tall trees and wide rivers, I look at my feet. Retreat into myself, a perceiving thing, and a thing to be perceived, without sense of which is which—other than some vague memory of a rational animal that emerged from the woods, until I now re-entered.

In the wooded world, I roll in my present fingers a perfect stone for the game we played on the lakefront yesternoon. Take aim at a tree down the mountainside. And release it. Ahead the group has left me; I run to catch up.

Longer than the zig-zags rise, we come upon two others: one kneeling, holding his face, and the other standing.

I ask the standing what happened; she hands me a stone perfect for the game that we played on the lakefront yesternoon, “This came down through the trees.”

The kneeling looks up; I look back into my own eyes and do my best to smile with my jaw hanging from its hinge on one side, a smooth string of blood streaming through the ghost teeth. I smile back to myself, showing me my own crooked jaw, and hook a finger in my cheek to show the scar between my top and bottom molars.

At once, my companion and I become ourselves.