The light caught her heels as she stepped ahead of me along the path, turning the corner, all I saw were her heels and ankles as she entered the deeper woods.

When I got to the place on the path where I’d seen her, she had already been absorbed in the forest. Movies had shown me night frights and costumed forest creatures, old trolls from pre-Christian times, dancing ominously before the fire, while the unsuspecting explorer was tied and held captive. I was not to be that explorer. I stayed on the path, knowing I’d catch up to her sometime.

When the couple was separated in the hiking paths, one had gone one way, another took a different route. They were to meet at the end of the trail, but she arrived before him. Yet she had got there late, it was already darkening so she called for help because she worried he must be lost. He was eventually found after spending the night thrashing through the forest. Arms and legs bleeding and scarred by the bushes and branches in the woods, grateful to be alive. They reunited with this knowledge of the abyss between them, the difficulty of communication without cell reception, the power of night. Why had they gone on separate paths?

I think they had argued, and both in their respective corners had decided to each do the hike as they wished. But the key is to have a companion, and to look out for one another, not to forge a personal way without the other. Why? We bond not only to have children, but to care for one another. Not only to be glorious in sexuality and to open up an intimacy of the whole being that includes all aspects of the self, high and low, loving and accepting it all in one another, we become whole through that. Then to lose one part of this couple is a return to individuality, but with a very different take. With love and yet wholeness that has been shattered by loss, it becomes profound depth.

Nothing can ever compare to the beauty of this inviolable solitude, which then like a tall white tower, turns and bends toward earth, shedding light to all. I was one such tower, I was one such person. I became whole and then shattered. It has been a repeated pattern that becomes more beautiful over the years. Buffed patina. The pattern’s glowing form takes shape with each loss and change.