One day I lost my mind. It had been safely encased within my skull my entire life, but somehow it was gone. Fled or meandered away, I wasn’t sure which.
One just isn’t oneself without the mind, so I realized I had better go find it. But where? Somehow, I sensed through some profound connection that my brain had wandered far, far away on a grand adventure through obscure corners of the universe. It must have gotten tired of the aches and pains that a body brings and who could blame it. I had been both straining it and dulling it as a bookkeeper by day and an explorer of virtual worlds by night, spending 15 hours daily in front of a screen.
My mind always did have a tendency to wander, but now it was gone altogether.
It's hard to make a rational plan for finding one’s mind when the seat of rationality is gone. Fortunately, my spinal cord and nervous system were still around and, in their groping way, were able to send my body on this long, desperate search. Even without the higher-order thinking of a brain, the rest of me was able, perhaps through instinct, to grope its way to a plan of action.
It would have been easier if my mind was a tourist strolling through, say, Tibet or Timbuktu. But, since my mind was literally out-of-this-world, I would have to hitch a ride on a spaceship. But Space X and other such human efforts are crude and don’t really go anywhere, just up a few thousand miles then down again, a journey to nowhere. What remained of me was already quite capable of pointless ambling.
Fortunately, there had long been reports of UFO landings among the Lonely Hills only a few miles from my obscure town. I would pick the loneliest of these hills and hope that, somehow, an extraterrestrial craft would pick me up. I packed up plenty of food—chicken sandwiches, plums, apricots, muffins, and, when all of these went bad, nuts and dried mango—to take me through what could be a long wait for the UFO, plus multiple gallons of water, a pup tent, a sleeping bag and pillow. Luckily it was early fall, a moderate time of year, and I lived in a region with mild winters.
My first evening out, I ambled away from the road, through thickening woods. After a particularly gloomy patch, I found the perfect clearing, awash with light. As I entered the glade, I thought I spotted something darting away through the forest. A human figure? Perhaps a woman? Or was it my imagination.
Enveloped by my pup tent, I had a marvelous sleep that night. I realized how much easier it is to sleep without a mind keeping you awake with all kinds of extraneous thoughts and worries. No UFO came but I awoke refreshed, the cool air pumping in my lungs. I was swollen with the joy of life, a joy I had never felt in front of a computer screen. As I explored the surrounding forests and glades, I thought how much better it was than some distant planet dreamed up by some team of overworked IT people, flat and lifeless on a screen. The wind in your face, grass and branches beneath your feet, an occasional squirrel or chipmunk or rabbit darting by, the birds twittering, cicadas humming, frogs thrumming.
As I walked, I noticed that the usual aches and pains from interminable days staring at a screen were gone, the soreness in my neck, back, and wrist, the gnawing headache. I felt light, energized as I hiked through a breach in the woods, found a little brook with clear cool water, and crouched down to sip.
As day broke into evening, an unseasonable heat crept up. Unused to a day filled with walking, my knees were beginning to ache, but I was certain I’d have another wonderful night’s sleep. Instead, the second night was horrible. A thick layer of heat and humidity kept me sticky, flies buzzed incessantly in my ears, I awoke intermittently, and by the morning my legs were riddled with mosquito bites.
Still, the next day I felt a burst of energy and managed a hike to what I thought was the top of the hill, although the woods kept me from viewing the grand vista of my imagination.
On the third night, a yellow light filled my tent awakening me from a deep sleep. Groggy, I stumbled out of my tent and saw it—that primal, glowing disc out of a million sci fi movies. Precarious on a tripod of legs, somehow it did not tip over. As I approached, it got larger, larger, larger, utterly filling my vision. I scurried desperately around the thing looking for a door, but only smooth surface greeted me, cackled at me. Perhaps an opening would appear and vaguely humanoid beings pop out. Over the next several hours, I circled the thing seven times despite its vast girth, but it sat inert, a giant Frisbee filling the field, crushing the nearby trees that I often had to skitter round. Finally, I got down on my knees and started banging on the entity’s cold surface. “Take me with you,” I entreated, “take me with you.” As if in reply, the entity began to quiver. A golden light appeared just below it at its core and it levitated, legs retracting. It hovered for a full 15 seconds—I don’t know why I counted, “one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three . . .”—then silently zoomed forward and up, shrinking rapidly, a discus thrown into the sky by a young Olympian, disappearing among the innumerable stars that cluster thickly in the night away from city lights.
I fell into a deep sleep and awoke with light streaming into the tent. A woman’s head popped in. “Are you all right,” said a beautiful old hag, her wrinkled face lined with kindness, her voice smooth as honey yet with a rough, local accent. “Do you have enough food?”
“I saw a UFO,” I said, “so close I could touch it. I did touch it. Or was it all a dream?”
“They’re real, all right,” she said. Her shirt had a huge gash and her jeans were raggedy. “I seen ‘em every few weeks, you never know when.”
“I was hoping to hitch a ride.”
“Me too. But they never pick you up. Those stories about being abducted are all lies.”
“I need to voyage to distant planets, to find my lost mind.”
“I don’t know about no mind. But I had had enough of life. Took too many sleeping pills. When that didn’t kill me, I headed out to the Lost Hills hoping them extry terrestrials would take me. But I never could get close.”
“I just saw it, touched it. But it left me behind.”
“No worries. Life’s better among the hills. They’s plenty of roots and berries, rabberts and squirrels to hunt, brooks with fresh water, colder and more delicious than anything you’ll get from a tap. Luckily, I learned survival skills way back when I was a girl. Never thought I’d get a chance to use ‘em. That’s my livelihood now.”
We spent the day gathering roots and berries, plus the tiny apples that grew on a few trees, caught a huge, fat rabbit for dinner, roasted it over an open flame. That night, she invited me into her tent. “The winters get cold,” she told me, “but now I’ll have you to warm me.”
Life’s much better here in the hills. We do suffer—I’ve got a strange rash on my left arm and another running up and down my right leg that itches and itches and won’t go away. And my knees can ache at the end of a day. Still, the days are beautiful and the plants and animals provide beauty, food, and fresh air. It’s a hard life and only death awaits, but much better than what I left behind. A mind is a beautiful thing to lose.
We still see the UFOs sometimes in the dark, unfathomable hours. Still hoping they’ll take us away to Jupiter and Mars, to the star clusters and nebulae shining a spectrum of colors, to the edge of the galaxy, to some place much better.
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