A woman saw a bench while walking through the forest and stopped for a rest.  She was carrying so much baggage that it was harder and harder to walk on.  Wondering what to do, she sat on the bench and thought for a long time with her legs crossed and her arms holding her close, trying to shut out the draft coming through the zipper in her coat.  What if she just stayed here?  “I can use this bench as a bed, a table, even a dresser, and the trees can be coat racks and I can display all my baggage about me” she said as if we could hear her.  And so she did.  She hung her parents’ divorce on the nearest birch tree and her childhood eating disorder on closest maple tree.  Next she attached her sibling rivalry, impatience and modern guilt on the oak tree next to the bench.  For hours she hung up old baggage full of barren womb, of daddy issues, of self-loathing all around her until not even the little parcel of self-doubt was left on the ground.  She pulled out a fleece blanket from her childhood memories suitcase and sat back down on the bench.  The blanket covered her in warmth like only a fire or imagination could make.  She hadn’t given up, she’d given in.  She was happy to have finally stopped moving.  A small smile crept into her lips when she surveyed all the old crud she’d been hulling around and grew bigger still when she realized for the first time she could stretch out her body like never before.  She reached her hands up high into the air and arched her back like a cat.  Without the baggage to impede her she lifted her legs out and pointed her toes up and down, up and down.  She stood, letting the fleece fall to the ground, and bent over, hanging there like a rag doll for while, letting the blood pool in her head, letting the tension out of every limb.  When she looked back up again it was as if the future had became magnified – the trees pointed the way out, the way to tomorrow, to next week, to another phase of the same lifeline only somehow it was brighter.  The trees bent this way and that to clear a path she couldn’t miss.  She remembered some olives she had been saving for a snack in her ‘failure to eat well’ bag and went to dig them out.  She rubbed her eyes twice and rubbed them again to make sure what she was seeing was real.  All of her baggage had disappeared from the branches and only the bench and her fleece blanket remained.  Like a jail break from prison she left before she could get caught up again in the past and ran away from seclusion.  Her tracks were almost invisible on the hard October ground, like the life she had lived until now.  She could see the future starting that very second she started running away.   She could think only of this moment, of feeling alive and winning against the things trying to beat her down.  The ventilation of the forest air was like candy to a starving child and finally she could breathe again.  Her lungs, now full and powerful, made each stride easier than the one before.  Without the weight of her world bearing down on her shoulders she pressed on and never looked back.