Free Writing: The fourth step beside a wild flower

Even before she had taken the first step that would lead to a thousand battles, she had mentally crossed the barrier to the forest long ago, in sight of it many leagues before. One doesn`t enter lightly the last forest in the world, even if it stretched across the full western half of the United States. Mentally she was already striding along the Southern-Bale trail, time as we measure it with mechanical precision slowly fading with the opinions of others in that other life. But that first step, brushing the stands of prairie grass and coming to rest on a dry pine twig amidst a bed of long faded needles. It was early summer but the heat lay on the earth like a blanket, smothering ambitions and hopes alike. But her ambitions and hopes had been born and built up up over many long and hard seasons. They would not lie down nor float away under anything nature could produce. That first step led to a second and then a third and before she realized, she had crossed the line and was committed at the fourth step, which fell besides a yellow wild flower.

Truly committed and it was joyous- such a sense of freedom that she let out a yell of exaltation that raised birds into the air. And she admitted to herself that now she could no longer question herself, no longer have doubts about each decision she had made to reach this threshold. All the efforts spent to train herself, the time spent in examination of everything she had held dear, now were finished. Now she could only affect two outcomes. She would succeed and gain a life worth living for, or she would do what she could, would spend every amount of will power in the effort to succeed but would not. And then simply life was not for her and she would go to death completely empty of the movement of life.