I don't want to be human.

I don't want to be human. At least, not in the way we've made being human.

We've made being human a combination of tasks to do, money to earn, bills to pay, pain to feel, and noise to drown in. Being human is living 90% of an existence in four walls. Being human is sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. Being human is driving from here to there habitually, eating things we shouldn't, coexisting with what we hate. Being human is conditioning ourselves to disconnect and disengage and repress.

We die realizing we've killed ourselves with ourselves. I don't want to leave Earth realizing that I've done that.

Sometimes, when I let myself, I slip into places I've never been and I know what to do to not die by these things we say make us human: run. My desk fades away, my concerns quiet, and all I can see and feel inside me are jagged peaks drenched with snow. Music is playing and I am skiing, sometimes snowboarding, leaving tracks in clouds of powder, or sometimes just standing there among the trees, gasping at the immensity of it all, this space I never knew was tucked beneath my skin.

I open my bones, and there are mountains inside them. Desert, snow-capped peaks, woods, rocks, mountains. Endangered things. Delicate things. Things I want to touch and breathe in every day, and things I ache about, because I know they're out there somewhere.

I don't want to be human. I want to be wilderness. I want there to be no seam, no separation, no "how's life?" "it's going" in between me and untouched places.

Stitched together like that, I'd imagine I could live without fear or worry. Maybe one day I'll try.


*This word vomit brought to you by a half hour of free time and Ari's overwhelming wanderlust.