Day 9 – Way Home

Elephants liked plains with tall grasses. Trees were not very elephant friendly. There was a good reason for that. Elephants were not very friendly to them. They trampled and uprooted... not mindlessly, only at the least provocation.

She was not sure how far will she be able to go with them before they parted course. But for now the elephant party was headed in the same direction as home. She had found grooves to hold on to and the hair she had found ticklish initially were now just very comfortable and soft on her side.

She was many hours away from home, but at elephant pace she would be home earlier than she had planned.

Somewhere around the rock of ape she realized that the party was now moving in a different direction. She jumped off the trunk and… did not know what to do next.

It was a strange day. She was crying for the second time already. She looked into the right eye of the mother and hugged her trunk. She was decidedly not worried about cultural translations. She wanted to do what she felt like. Then she looked at him. He understood, it seemed. He tried to hold on to her ankles and then her arm. He got a kiss. She felt a bit silly. In the amount of silly she was already feeling this much more was not going to make any difference- “I will miss you," she said. And as she had foreseen it happen, turned around and ran away, sobbing.

She ran a long way before she had to stop. Until now she had managed to time the heavy breathing and sobbing to rhythm with her heartbeats and footsteps. She sat against a tree and saw a red blurred vision chasing a smaller blurred orange vision. In a few moments it was only a red bird perched on the branch of a tree further away, an orange wing still sticking out of his beak. The sound effect to this whole experience was sobbing.

She had experienced it before. When you cry long enough you forget why you were crying and normal thinking resumed, even as the physical crying continued. And then you stop to think why were you crying and are unable to find any reason. You felt silly about the whole thing. In a little while the reasons and the crying would resume.

She had just started walking silently towards home when, on a terrible urge, she started running and threw herself into the safety of a thicket.