Into the Wild

Into the Wild

On a damp Tuesday, the city stopped humming,
and I, clutching a battered map and a half‑full flask,
took the last bus through alley‑shrouded streets.
Leaves were flecked with gold, the air rose heavy with peat,
an invitation to break the cycle of polished glass.

I turned onto a hay‑scented lane, where hedgerows stood like the old panes of a weathered cottage, its eaves stark against clouds.
A wood’s sigh at the edge of a brook murmured in orange whisper‑guilt, and at last I slipped past the border gates, the wooden door swinging onto a world I knew by feel, not deed.

The moor sprawled like a pale painted field, wild grasses curling around forgotten stones, pockets of moss in creaking old oaks.
Sunlight pressed into the trellis of creeping bramble, amber flecks settled upon the ground like coins smuggled off a bridge.

I paused by a thicket of blackberry and tasted the sweet decay—
a reminder that growth always meets its own rent.
Wings of a hornet, a hush was broken; the scent of loam deepened, percolating the hollows of thought, discord and calm.

The wind did a dance across my shoulder, threading the scents of pine
and damp stone. My breath caught between the boughs and the sky.
A song, urgent and bright, rose from a nearby meadow—
a choir of birds that sang in a tongue younger than the old stitch of us.

No tourist can promise you such a scene; the wild is its own author— it writes in moss, dreams in nettles, and in its own stumbling rhythm keeps promise to the earth that is ancient and true.

For I am here, out on this path that curls like a fledgling's flight, where streetlights are replaced by the glow of twilight.
With the wind in my hair, I inhale pigeon‑plucked pines,
drink from the pure brother of the stream, and for the first time feel
that I am carrying no secret between my fingers but a sigh and a heightened heartbeat—a song from the wild, silent to our tired city lights.

The road back is hidden behind a shaggy wall of moss, but I know: once you touch the honest wild’s pulse, you can never forget the way it rewards the brave with its silent invitation—
that we are part of this great tapestry of land and certainty,
and that the wild, once loved, will always whisper back, in the softest hue of green.