Affirmation
A while ago I expressed a desire for a place I could call mine on campus. It seems I've found one, and it is indeed on the bough of a certain climbable tree. And, much to the chagrin of certain friends, I've a stubborn affinity for getting to the highest branches: a quality that is necessarily accompanied by a certain disregard for personal safety.
Not suicidal, I assure you. There's something heady in the roughness against palms, in that vertiginous narration of the fall. The gravity of distance is published along every branch from your feet to the ground, and there's nothing to match that clenched frisson of exhilaration, white as knuckles and the chunks of sky between the latticed leaves above.
And the roughness, an everpresent reminder of circumstance, position. Something tactile, and real, amidst the dizzying emptiness, affords a strange feeling of belonging. The higher you go, the emptier your surroundings, and the more real the branch you dangle from must become; thus, the greater the affirmation of belonging, even in such discommodious locales. But action precedes location. Climbing: it filters out the drudgery, the worries, the concerns, the petty responsibilities. The unnecessary percolates into immediacy. Because ultimately, at the top of a tree, never mind exams, never mind emotional grief, never mind existential crises; all you can worry about is not falling.
It's a weird kind of escapism, but it works. Not a disregard for personal safety, then, but a desire to reaffirm the person. Possibly I've been alone for too long.