Lessons have slipped my mind and gravitated elsewhere. Some place mysterious, I hope. I couldn’t process how the earth – the clumps that I mashed between the crevices of my boots – was ultimately a sphere. There was nothing round at my core, certainly nothing as stable as a circle. As it became darker, I walked the midnight forests. I took the soil and rubbed it between my fingers and fleshed out my nail beds. I took muddy leaves and laced them between my toes as protection. I masked my face and thickened my clothes to eradicate my humanness. Smelling of the fleshless soil, I took handfuls and fed myself, sucking up the mud, blowing wiggly earthworms out from my nostrils. I let the…