It is the end of the day, and you have just finished a long day at work. A bit stiff from several hours in your office chair, standing is a relief. You gather your things, tidy your workspace, and walk out of your grey, featureless cubicle. Go down the flights of concrete stairs, across the asphalt of the street, and turn left into the building where you have always lived. It will be nice to be home, and indeed it is another relief to reach the grey, featureless cubicle where you live. You loosen the tie that’s been subtly scratching your neck all day, and snug up the much softer and more comfortable home tie. You eat dinner at your home desk and look out, across your neighbor’s cubicles, through the window at the forest across the street. The forest is beautiful, a vast expanse of rippling greens and browns that has always enchanted you, but the one time you turned right after crossing the street you saw bunch of gross bugs and you turned around and came home.

That was pretty much to be expected, per your neighbors. “I don’t know what you thought would happen; the only reason anyone goes to the forest is to roll in the mud anyway,” said your boss Mark, upon hearing of the incident. “You’ve got to have an unusual love for filth to spend any real time there.”

This seemed to match popular perceptions; at lunch Ron tells you that since dirt has poop in it, anyone who would be willing to sleep in the dirt must be a real freak. Your neighbor Jason across the aisle at home gives you a pamphlet by someone who was stung by an insect and had a severe reaction and now advocates about the dangers of the forest. Your neighbor across the cube wall at work, Phyllis, sighs and recounts sadly how her daughter lived in the forest and died in the big forest fire a decade ago, even though she’d tried to warn her that it wasn’t safe. So you go back to living your life. You do well at work, and you’re given more responsibility, and you start to work with new people. You walk down the stairs, across the street, and turn left into your building, walk to your grey, featureless cubicle and you stare out the window at the forest across the street. And then you curl up with a blanket on the thin carpet over flat concrete floor and think about how lucky you are to have a roof over your head and four walls surrounding you.

One day, your colleague Andy walks in with a leaf in his hair. You ask him about it and he chuckles, and tells you that yeah, he lives in the forest actually. That weirds you out, and you’re suspicious of him for a while, but he seems like a standup guy. You’re just a little extra careful to wash your hands after shaking his, you know? Eventually you meet another person who lives in the forest, then another and another. None of them are perfectly clean maybe, a spot of dust on a knee makes the occasional appearance, a twig falls from a pocket or a sleeve here and there, but certainly nothing like you were lead to believe. You come to an appreciation for plants just from listening to them talk about their lives in the forest, and get a little mint plant in a pot, the green of its leaves flat and simple but stark in contrast to the grey cube in which it lives.

Phyllis says she’s worried about you. One plant seems fine, you know, but you never know with these plants. She’s heard mint grows quickly and is scared it’s going to grow out of its pot and strangle you. Ron looks at the little pot with open disgust, and looks at you the same way after you handle it. Jason tries, but it clearly makes him uncomfortable any time he can see it, so you keep it in the corner of your cube as much as possible because you don’t want to be a nuisance even though the little sprig brings you joy. One day you return from lunch and the pot is empty, having been emptied, washed, and dried. Mark tells you he did it for the good of your social life - people were starting to talk, you see, and he knows you don’t want people to make fun of you or gossip behind your back, so he figured he’d just solve your problem for you. You’re welcome.

You walk down the stairs, across the street, and turn left into your building, walk to your grey, featureless cubicle and you stare out the window at the forest across the street.

One day, while you are staring at the forest, you make a decision. The next day, you walk down the stairs, across the street, and turn right. You walk into the forest. You are not alone, of course; Austen, one of the forest dwellers you know offered to walk with you and serve as something of a guide, at least as much as this deep, dark wood can have a guide. You step into the forest and are nearly overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic profusion of greens, each leaf a slightly different shade than the last, blending into yellows, browns, and oranges, unnerving after the endless consistent grey of your workplace and home life. It is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying to you as much as it is obviously profoundly normal, if not boring to the sparse traffic of people between the trees. You turn away from a hive of gross bugs like you saw before, repulsed but resolute. You pass a forest market, an island of people and art and displays in the ocean of trees. Your overflowing mind lets out a gurgling scream inside your skull, refusing to process the chaotic rainbow miasma into intelligible shapes so soon after attuning to the subtle natural spectrum of the forest. You are very tired, and Austen helps you to find a good place to sleep - a simple wooden bed in an open-ended timber shelter.

You lay in the bed, uneven but soft and yielding, and try to get used to the open air instead of climate control, the chirps of birds and the rustle of leaves instead of the gentle whir of fans, try not to think about the insects that might be crawling on you, try not to worry about how you’re going to stay clean, try to just go to sleep. This is not what you are used to, you are profoundly uncomfortable and you’re not sure whether your heart or your mind is racing faster as a nauseous surety rises from deep within your core, a buried truth breaking your facade from within in an ugly orogeny of tears you do not know how to stop: You will never willingly turn left after you cross that street, ever again.