*
I hardly slept that night, and lay awake hearing every small noise. Every time I dipped into sleep, my thoughts would return to what lay ahead, and a rush of nerves would shoot my eyes open to the darkness.
At last the hour came for me to rise, when the night was at its deepest, the temple bell tolling a single time. I slipped from my bedding, the night air holding a chill edge. I fumbled with the flint until I had the candle lit and by its tiny flickering light I made my preparations. My straw sandals were inside the door, rather than at the vestibule near the door of the house. I roped them on while sitting on the low pad of my bed, as I had been instructed. The wrongness of it wrenched my heart more that I would have expected. I donning shoes inside the room symbolized that the running monks had no intention of returning.
It seemed the entire world was my own as I stood on the doorstep, hesitating to place my foot down into the earth. My toes, sockless and naked in flimsy straw sandals, were already numb with cold, the joints in my knees and hip ached, the rising sun yet hours away. In the faint light of the half-moon, the quietude of the forest seemed ominous, its hidden ghosts and spirits of those long dead. The vast dome of the night sky overhead echoed the loneliness in my soul.
With a gentle tipping of my body weight, that I let go of my tangled thoughts and stepped forward: one step, two, three, until I had built a rhythm, jogging at a steady pace, my head level, shoulders relaxed, nose and navel aligned, plunging directly into the depths of that dark forest.
Beneath the canopy, my fears evaporated, and I begin to run.
Part Two
Five years later.