Losing

To lose or to get lost?
What is worse?
Let's say: you walk in the woods for a while and suddenly you have no idea where you are, the sun is going down slowly. You know this because of the angle of the light. And the color. The color of light is really important; that much you have gathered. Orange is bad, yellow is good. Gray and blue are absolutely out of the question, because then you are really, really lost. You calm yourself down, after all, you only walked one hour before you felt lost; and then, the thought strikes you: you're not lost, you only feel lost, which is quite different. You listen carefully: every sound is now distinctive, you can almost hear every bird around you, and the sound of the river, which is not, like most books say, a 'flow', but more like a whoosh, a gush, a swash, definitely, that is NOT a flow.
Then, the birds, the countless birds that up till now you didn't even notice: there are sparrows, robins, ravens, maybe an eagle? They chirp and hum. You know that noise coming from below is nothing more than a bunch of big black hard working ants. Their big strong jaws braking and severing the leaves on the floor.
And even now you can identify every single noise and sound coming from every possible direction you can think of: nothing reliable, nothing known, nothing familiar, not one throat coughing, not one sensitive nose twitching in front of a wild flower. Not the rustle of tired feet coming from atop the mountain. And then, only then, you know that you are lost.

Or is it worse to lose? Is it worse to pat your own ass looking for your wallet, knowing every hard evidence that you exist in the civilized world is lost? Even better (worse) to pat your chest, looking for that feeling you just had, moments ago, that so familiar feeling of warmth and confidence, and bright futures and theylivedhappilyeverafter sensation. Then, just like when you feel lost, you try to calm yourself down; you are thinking, I just feel that I lost it, it must be here somewhere, I just turned my head for a moment. But then, the more you dig in your kernel, the more you dissect and tear apart your intestines, your own guts, the more convinced you are that it is gone, forever, maybe.

It is just so easy to lose yourself in the woods, you say to yourself, while climbing a rock towards what appears to be a road, even though you know you could be wrong.