Slowly walking to the south part of campus, I thought about my life here: how long I had been at Oberlin, all the things I had done, looking down streets and into houses, just remembering old friends and situations. I went behind a building and crossed over a rolling hill, near the dorm where Erin used to live. I looked at the drawn curtain, going back to when we shared each other, feeling strange that I felt it and yet didn't at all anymore.

I looked up and listened to the white noise of the lamplights, moving this way and that past unfamiliar houses. I turned a few corners and unexpectedly came across the bonsai home. I had discovered it the summer before last when I worked at Oberlin as a researcher.

Oddly its side and back gates were open, almost inviting with christmas lights hung around the frame. Looking into the courtyard it was still full of bonsai, rows and rows of wooden benches supporting delicate conifers in clay pots. I always loved coming here and admiring them. Walking in and looking at a few new ones, I thought about how much I wanted to raise bonsai when I had an apartment. It was as if the owner purposefully left open the gates for people like me to look in and admire them; small towns have advantages sometimes.

Everything behind me disappeared as I entered the arboretum and walked up to the lake. I could see the moonlight reflecting off the ice in faint oval patterns and thin lines. The veil of clouds had parted overhead, stars shimmering like flakes of glass on the side of the road. I kept staring straight at the moon, closing my eyes occasionally to see how the impressions of light changed.

The forest all around is still in the bare of winter, the moonlight giving the trees a muted grey-white glow. The path near the lake was narrow, the old spanish fort growing smaller behind me as I looked into the forest. All of the trees were frozen images, some hunched like old men with a thousand slender fingers. One reminded me of a spider. As I slide down the incline and held one of its slender branches, I didn't feel disturbed by it, almost comforted. One of my animal guides is the spider. Nowadays I almost feel ok with that.

As I walked to the entrance of the forest I looked up at the canopy. At night the area usually makes me feel hunted, like some beast is hatefully watching me. Tonight the tops of the trees vibrated under the moonlight, a series of unending lonely branches letting in all the luminesence above. It felt inviting, natural, as if it were my home.

The feeling of walking through a brightly lit forest at night is hard to describe. You should feel scared but you don't. You can see as far as your eye can focus. Shapes are distinct up close, but things blur into shadow and light as you look into the distance. The bark on the trees, the leaves on the ground, even the mud squishing underneath has some new, familiarly mysterious quality in how it feels, how it looks. There's an unmistakable, calm solitude around and within you. You become aware of everything around you in the silence. It's like talking to someone you hold alot in common with, finding out new and old things about them and yourself as you spend more time with them.

I was sad to leave the forest. Out there my identity blurs and disappears like sunlight into an ocean. Underneath the light and canopy I just enjoy being something without being someone.

If only for a little while, it reminds me of what it's like just to feel.

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