It's been a year since I ran through these woods, a regular afternoon pastime to ingest fresh air and stay fit. My old route was instinctive and it seemed to run under me instead of the other way around. The woods were exactly as I remembered them, populated with naked giants, their black bones reaching up to shake their fists at the cold. Their roots were hidden under forgotten leaves, piling and piling and piling up. I jogged around a tree and dragged my gloved fingers across its bark, continuing an old habit from 2008 and conveying the same secret message, "Hello again, tree."
The same mud patches were patched in mud and I laughed as usual as I gracelessly hopped around the worst of it. The halfway-hill was just as steep and I adopted the same restrained job to keep myself from flying forward.
But the thin streams that ran along the last leg home were dry and I wondered what became of the school of freshwater mermaids that would swim alongside me as my heart thumped my feet forward. I was the only half-breed in the woods that day, but the magic of the German forest was in infinite supply.
I dared not spit near the trees as I still believed that they had the power to absorb my DNA and transform into my duplicate. It's the way these trees moved on to their second life, and they wait in earnest for one of us to give them the opportunity.
Every path had a story and every run created more. The woods were no longer a conglomeration of flora, but instead, a living storybook where each corner was synonymous with the turning of pages. As I neared the end of my route, I already knew that running would never get any better than this.
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