To get to the lake, you have to drive up and around curved little roads so that when you park your car at the reliably empty parking lot, you may step a couple of steps through the shrubbery and see a vast crater break open in front of you. At the bottom of it–a lake. The board read: one of the deepest sinkholes in the world, total depth 520 meters, cliffs, access challenging, May 2017, French cave diver Frederic Swierczynski first person to reach the bottom, oxide deposits make the surrounding rock red.

It must have been wild to be the first person to see the sinkhole. I look at it every year, wishing to scrape the first row of the forest at the top of the crater, like icing from a cake. That’s how thin the forest trees appear in the distance.

I started walking on the shade-covered side, wondering if I’d notice when I crossed the shadow line into the sunny side. Cicadas, the swoosh of the trees, rocks rolling underneath my shoes, birds chirping in dried-up grass. I’m a top-tier candidate for sound therapy. For me, it’s the depth of the layering, the heat, and the thickness of the forest around it.

I messaged M. about the perceived potential of rapists and murderers lurking in the bushes. She said it’s unlikely they’d sit there all day but still to wait for A. before I go off the beaten path.

I tried to rant about how my job is going away and how, soon enough, AI will be messaging Borja about the translations in the URLs for the accessibility page. Mid-rant, I realized I don’t necessarily care about all that and might not even fear it to begin with. Falling into this crater would be much worse. And besides, change happens no matter what. The rocks around this lake were positively rock-colored until the iron minerals in the rock began to oxidize. So there is that.

This is precisely why I end up twisting my ankles on hikes. My mind spirals into space, and the body has to call me back to Earth by way of sharp pain in the measly mechanism above my right foot.

I finished the loop around the lake and drove back to Grandma. On my way, I picked up a freshly baked loaf of bread. Since that was the main reason I’d given for heading out in the first place, it would have been strange to come back without it.