I keep finding trails I’ve walked before.
Not because the landscape repeats — it doesn’t. The geology is always new: this ridge, this drainage, this angle of erosion. My feet agree. They choose the same contour lines every time.
The trail register shows my name in my handwriting. The dates are months apart. Each entry describes the same thing differently, as though each description were original. It was. That’s the problem — not that I repeat, but that the repetition is genuine. Each pass is a first pass. The enthusiasm is real. The “again” is missing.
Someone at the trailhead asked how many times I’d walked this route. I said: once. She showed me the register. Five entries, same handwriting, same observations about the ridgeline, same notes about where the path narrows.
I read them and felt what you feel looking at a photograph of yourself as a child — yes, that’s me. No, I don’t remember.
The map gets more detailed with each pass. The margins are full of notes in my hand. Somewhere between the map and the margins, between the things I notice and the fact that I’ve noticed them before, there’s a person I keep almost meeting.