They say that whilst on the road to recovery, drug addicts will experience user dreams.
I have felling dreams.
They're not always the same. In fact, the most common one isn't so much a dream at all, but rather a memory. I even know which day it was from (the most common dream, that is), since it was the first time I had been allowed to fell 'on my own'- that is to say without a more experienced sawyer in the field. I handed off the truck keys to my coworker so he would have been able to drive me to ER should I do something dumb like drop a tree on myself, and set about taking down a huge snag that was loosely balanced in a fir tree.
With a set up like that, you're probably expecting something awful is going to happen next, but it doesn't. It's just a normal day.
I'm stood in a city lot, not that anyone would guess this was a city lot rather than a tangled mass of vegetation if it wasn't for the chainlink fence some of them have grown into. Corporate volunteers from everyones favorite search engine had come through the previous week and pulled all the debris to the curbside, and now the fence is the only vestigial part of when this lot was occupied. When a house sat here. When there were kids on the street. Honestly I'm not one to get too sentimental about the abandonment though. I'm a rather pragmatic person, and it's more that it all seems such a waste. Empty homes. Vacant lots. The population of this city has halved in the last ten years having been on a slow decline even before that, and it shows.
The midday heat is inescapable; jeans, boots, chaps and a helmet all in conditions much more suited to shorts and sandles. I've got an OccuNomix cool band above my brow, but it's doing little good. Rarely does it stay icy for more than 5 minutes or so, and now the water is just adding to the humidity.
Deet and sweat. My skin glistens.
I roll my wrist forward- Chain brake on- and throw and grab the handlebar rotating the saw ready to make the back cut. Today I have no idea how I was ever strong enough or fit enough to wield around a 20lb chainsaw with ease, but I was much stronger when I didn't work at a desk.
I push the bar into the tree. Sometime it falls, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I go on to buck it up, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'm not even cutting, but rather am sat cross legged sharpening a chain in the grass. Or I'm just clearing light vegetation. Or I'm driving the truck, with its distinct lack of functional brakes.
I don't doubt what any of this means. It's not a sign of something I subconsciously feel.
Much like the drug addict longs for another high, I simply have a deep, and incredibly painful yearning for the life I once lived.