Dappled trickles of sunshine mingled with wind-rustled leaves and birdsong drew me back into consciousness. I couldn't remember why these artifacts of reality felt so absurd to me, even as my muddled recovering mind fumbled at their meaning in clumsy anxiety. The breaths I was taking were sweet on my tongue but the smorgasbord of scents assaulting my olfactory organs evoked pungent depths foreign and repulsive to me. I could smell raw shit on the soft breeze that touched my face, fermenting vegetation, and the pregnant redolence of bursting, blooming life. It was all wrong - the place was wrong, my place in this world was wrong, I didn't belong here and there were beings here that didn't want me to witness their becoming.
I struggled internally to blink, to cough, to wretch myself out of being in this place with the suffocating embrace of life around me, and it took me days and moments to realize that I hadn't moved a muscle.
Moss and a verdant fringe were my bed, and my left hand rested numbly in the meandering tricklet of a creek as it passed silently by. Small creatures were disturbed in their doings by the disturbance of my woolen gathering of limbs. Rising with grace out of the question, I made a multi-stage dance in my fight against gravity. How strange, I thought - my feet are bare. When did I last walk in my bare feet?
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