It was the time we decided to spend the entire day wandering around, gathering important thoughts and changing our lives. There were three of us: Kara, Beth, and me, Sam. All American. All Floridian. I’m not sure why they did it, but I did it to change things, to make sure I had it all right.

We started out at the house, waving goodbye to our friends, promising we’d let them know if anything went wrong—things often do when you’re starting over. The house was right on the edge of a nature trail. Beth and I lived there together, and Kara had driven up for the weekend. We made our way past our neighbors’ houses, where the trees began and the creek disappeared somewhere into the green and the decay. Three women, two pairs of sunglasses, a camera, a lighter, and two joints. Our tongues moved around in our mouths searching for holes until we found a fallen branch off of the trail and decided to make it our first landmark. We swallowed hard, lit the first joint, and kept walking.

Some of the thinner trees began to look like spider webs, but nothing big was happening. We found the creek. It was ten feet below us, surrounded by two feet of beach on either side. It kept winding around, turning into Africa or South America or anywhere but here.

Kara and Beth have known each other for years. Their parents all went to high school together, got married, then stayed in the same town for college and for the rest of their lives. Beth’s mom is a realtor—that’s how we got the house. I never considered myself a city girl, but twenty years from now the two of them will still be friends and I will be somewhere else.

We climbed around for a while. Kara’s dyed-red hair was floating in the sun and Beth turned into a lion’s cub, bounding around in the dead leaves and beetles and Spanish moss. She really does take after her father. We found a wooden deck and reclined, staring up at thousands of butterflies, moving together in the wind.

On our way out of the woods, we found a bench. Kara kept yelling, “This is it! This is it!” so I took a picture of the two of them sitting down. It wasn’t right. I don’t mean the picture. The picture perfectly framed them and the bench. It just wasn’t right having a camera there.

We found our way back to the house and smoked the second joint outside on the porch. Everyone had gone. Beth kept telling me I was a tree, so I let my roots into the ground and felt the photosynthesis. “Feed me.” Kara was the philosopher. The three of us sat there thinking for a long time, but the day was young and I was beginning to fear the possibility of sitting around for the rest of the day. We were supposed to be building.

We changed rooms, continuing to sit. My body was ungrateful. Snot kept accumulating in rocks and fluids, and my head ached from all the thinking. It takes a lot to change your life. I figured we needed to start moving, and we hadn’t explored the old gazebo back on the trail, so I said out loud, “We never went to the gazebo!”

And then it went bad. Beth’s face began to bubble and she wouldn’t talk. She huddled into that lost space and the fear of mental illness that we all shared. We were no longer real to her, two projected images of her unconscious mind, becoming less and less valid—less and less worth paying attention to. I dialed her boyfriend on the phone.

“Stefan?”

“Yeah, is everything alright? Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, I think something’s wrong with Beth.”

“Ok, want me to come over?”

The pictures on the walls were moving so I hung up, but in a few minutes Stefan arrived and helped Beth throw up. She would turn into a goddess later, riding elephants with her dance and aqua eyeliner.

Kara and I went to the gazebo while Beth got sick, and we talked our way through truth. I would say, “I mean, we’re not going to die.”

And she would reply, “Exactly! So there’s nothing wrong!”

We felt like preachers, trying to lead Beth back into the light. But after a while Kara, the philosopher, began to repeat herself and it was like hearing her bounce around in her own head, echoing and finding the corners. There were spiders everywhere, nestling into the moist, old cracks made in the wood by animals and weather. I was tearing at a loaf of bread some friends had brought over around breakfast. It was my sole source of nourishment. I felt like a communist.

After a while, Stefan and Beth came out smiling. She had been saved. Turns out when I said, “We never went to the gazebo,” she thought I meant that we had never gone outside at all. The entire thing had been in her head. Something like that can mess you up. As for Stefan, it pays to have a leader when you’re building a society. Someone who has fun leading people around, keeping them active and alive. It’s easy to fall through the cracks—to get lost just like Beth did. Was it something I said?

A couple of hours later we got back to the house. Stefan had led us through the creek this time. It was the height of activity—moving around with the dirt and the water between our toes, feeling things. Earlier that day, before waving goodbye, before our friends dropped off the bread, we had set up a painting station. Old towels covered Beth’s carpet with stacks of canvas and some paint. I grabbed a piece of wood and started at it.

Somewhere in the woods, Beth had said, “Look at that! Not my that, your that. Whatever you’re looking at, don’t try and look at what I’m looking at, whatever you’re looking at I want you to paint that later. It has to be somewhere in your painting. And then we can all see what the other was looking at when I said this.”

So that’s what I painted. It was a fallen tree—but not just any tree, a matriarch of a tree. She hovered over the creek, old enough to reach the other side when she fell, to feed the worms over there. She had pink lichen spreading in lace doilies all over her body, blooming.

All throughout our travels Kara had been repeating the phrases “This is your that!” and “This is my that!” and taking pictures of said this’s and that's. It was appropriate that her painting consisted of multiple, unconnected icons, isolated moments manifest in objects she had seen and committed to memory to be relayed to her boyfriend later. I talked to my boyfriend once that day. He had been worrying since I called Stefan. I had no need to talk to him; I knew he was working all day. He paints too, but commercially, for a gallery. He electrocutes wood and cardboard and uses the fractals to paint cherry blossoms or otherwise Asian scenery. When Stefan handed me the phone with him on the line, I immediately cried and had to hang up. He knew why and that was all that mattered.