When the Wild Refused to Perform

When the Wild Refused to Perform

The first time the grass moved like water, I was standing on a red-dust verge near a lonely airstrip with my fingers curled around a sun-warmed doorframe, trying not to cry in front of strangers. The air smelled faintly of wild sage and engine heat and my own fear, the particular kind that comes from spending too much money you don't have on a trip you're not sure you deserve. Somewhere out beyond the scrub, a lion grumbled like distant thunder and went quiet again—the kind of quiet that is not empty but listening, and I realized with a sick twist in my gut that I had no idea what I was listening for. A breeze pressed the scent of rainless clouds across my cheek. I watched a ribbon of impala glance up as one body, silver ears aligned in a coordination I envied, and felt the city fall off my shoulders like an old coat I immediately wanted back because at least I knew how to wear that weight.

I came here for a map I could not fold, which sounds poetic but was actually just desperation dressed up as adventure. The hush before dawn. The animal roads older than borders. The gentle rules that supposedly teach a heart to belong without trying to own. But I was trying to own everything—the experience, the healing I thought would happen automatically, the transformation I'd promised myself if I could just get far enough away from my life. This was supposed to be the opposite of a checklist, but I'd turned it into one anyway: see lion, feel whole; watch sunrise, fix self; witness migration, become someone who could finally breathe without it hurting.

There is a clock the body keeps that has nothing to do with numbers, and mine was broken. It woke when anxiety decided, which was always, which was three a.m. in a tent that smelled like canvas and someone else's dreams, my heart hammering at sounds I couldn't identify. The first francolin called from the thorn and I flinched. A hyena's note hung at the edge of dark and I reached for my phone—dead, no signal, no escape into the infinite scroll that usually kept panic at bay. On safari, I was supposed to learn to keep animal time. Instead I learned how loud my own thoughts were when there was nothing to drown them out.

I drank tea by a soft lantern and stepped into the pending light feeling gravel under my soles and dread under my ribs. The vehicle door clacked shut with a kindness I couldn't reciprocate, and we moved into a landscape too big for the container of my body. Animals do not hurry toward meaning; they arrive inside it, and I sat there frantically searching for meaning in everything, turning every sighting into a metaphor I could take home and fix myself with. A giraffe tilted into the trees like a moving parenthesis and I thought about incompleteness. A jackal glanced back and vanished into amber grass and I thought about disappearing. My voice dropped without being asked because speaking felt like admitting I was there, and being there felt unbearable.

I stopped reaching for my phone not because the land insisted on simple verbs—breathe, look, listen—but because reaching for it reminded me it was useless, that I was cut off, alone with landscape and strangers and a version of myself I barely recognized. By afternoon the air turned to brass and I turned to something brittle. We idled in the mercy of shade and watched the distance carry heat like a mirage, and I thought: this is beautiful and I am not inside it. I am watching it through glass.

The mood of the day changed with a single shadow across a pan, and my mood swung with it—manic wonder crashing into hollow despair, the whiplash of someone who thought nature was supposed to heal but discovered it mostly just reveals. I practiced a small ethic not because I was virtuous but because rules felt safer than the terrifying openness of a place that didn't care whether I lived or died: take nothing, leave nothing, break nothing, speak only when wonder demands a witness. But wonder kept demanding and I kept choking on words that wouldn't come.

Where the plains lift like slow waves and acacia trees hold up the sky, the Mara gathers its stories and I gathered my failures. The curves of rivers drew a grammar of tracks and crossings I couldn't read—a living script that cats and antelope understood while I sat there illiterate, jealous of how easily everything else belonged. Hills rolled, then opened, then rolled again, and the light turned everything to truth except me. Lions took their rest with royal indifference to my presence, which should have been humbling but felt like rejection. Cheetahs wrote fast answers to patient questions I was too impatient to ask properly.

I remember the feather-flick of a lilac-breasted roller and thinking it was almost too beautiful, offensively bright, like the world was showing off while I was falling apart. At dusk we parked beside a bend of river where hippos breathed like bellows under the skin of water, and I thought about drowning, about how easy it would be to just slip under and let the current take the weight. On the far bank, a leopard moved with the particular grace of certainty I'd never possessed, the world widening wherever its paws fell while mine kept shrinking.

Across the border the grass kept speaking a language I couldn't learn fast enough. The Serengeti felt ancient in a way that made me feel temporary, disposable, a brief mistake the land would outlast without noticing. When wind ran its hand over the savanna, the seedheads answered like a crowd, and I sat there silent, excluded from the conversation. Wildebeest puzzled the horizon into moving dots that became a sentence my eyes refused to believe because believing required trust and trust required something I didn't have anymore.

Predators drew their geometry from immensity I couldn't comprehend. A lioness with a scar above her eye watched the mid-distance like a mathematician, and I watched her watching, envying her focus, her purpose, her ability to exist without constantly questioning whether she was doing it right. Everyone was reading someone else. I was reading myself, over and over, the same exhausting text that never resolved.

I stood on a low kopje and felt the sun find my shoulders the way it had found other shoulders for longer than history remembers, and the continuity crushed me. Out there, the world was not empty between animals; it was threaded with intent I couldn't access, survival as practice and beauty as byproduct, while I practiced anxiety and produced nothing but more of it. I tried to learn to see the thread. All I saw was how separate I was from everything that knew how to live without apology.

At the crater rim the air was fern-cool and the view was a held breath I couldn't release. The caldera was a great green bowl where clouds set their edges, a geography of closeness that felt like mockery—look how near everything is, look how you still can't touch it. We sank to the floor on switchbacks and entered a waking dream I couldn't fully enter because I was too busy documenting it, photographing it, trying to prove I'd been here even though I wasn't really here at all.

The day turned like a slow wrist and I turned like a broken clock. Zebras argued in stripes beside a waterline and I envied their clarity—black, white, no gray, no endless second-guessing. A rhino stood with the patience of a monument and I stood with the impatience of someone who thought if I just saw enough, felt enough, it would finally be enough. Distance was supposed to be domestic here—everything near enough to name—but I kept my hands quiet on my knees not because awe asked for restraint but because I was afraid if I moved I'd shatter.

Far south and west, a river refused the sea and chose to become a garden, and I refused healing and chose to become smaller. The Okavango arrived from far-off rain and emptied itself into quiet, fanning into channels where lilies kept their small suns and I kept my small griefs, hoarding them like proof I was still real. The delta was proof that geography can be tender, but I was proof that some people resist tenderness even when it's offered with both hands.

In a narrow channel I sat low in a mokoro while a poler read the water and I read my own catastrophizing thoughts on loop. The canoe slid without speaking past dragonflies that needled the air and I needled myself with every inadequacy I'd ever catalogued. Islands appeared and receded; each one held a different book of tracks I pretended to care about while actually just counting the hours until I could go home and pretend this had changed me.

By late afternoon the light slipped along the reeds like silk and slipped past me like I wasn't there. A fish eagle wrote a V across the sky. We came around a bend and stopped because a herd of elephants was considering the exact same piece of water, and our business was to be considerate, but I was only considering my own failure to feel what I was supposed to feel. The guide's hand lifted, open and calm, and I wanted to scream at the grace of it all, at how easily beauty happened here while I had to work so hard just to stay upright.

They call Victoria Falls the smoke that thunders and it thundered through my chest like proof of every storm I couldn't outrun. Even before I saw the water I heard its courage miles away, and I thought about how I had none, how I'd run here thinking distance was the same as bravery. We walked through palms and spray and the mist turned our skin to cool glass, and I felt see-through, transparent, like anyone could look at me and know I was faking. The river broke itself into light and I stood there breaking quietly, the roar kneading nothing out of my shoulders except the certainty that I'd spent a fortune to feel worse in a more beautiful place.

I leaned on a railing slick with wonder I couldn't access. A sunbird debated a flower like a jeweler examining a rare stone, and I debated whether anyone would notice if I just walked away from the group and kept walking. Power is not the opposite of gentleness; sometimes it is the path to it, but I had neither, just exhaustion dressed up as adventure, grief dressed up as wanderlust.

Kruger was a country within a country and I was a stranger within my own skin. Roads crossed the bush in honest lattice, giving ordinary travelers extraordinary chances to learn, but I was too busy hating how ordinary I felt to learn anything except that running doesn't work when you bring yourself along. Morning after morning, the park taught me that repetition is not failure of wonder; it is deepening, but I couldn't deepen—I could only skim the surface, tourist-light, taking photos of transformation I wasn't actually experiencing.

At dusk we stopped at a lookout to let the day close itself and I wanted to close too, to stop, to admit this wasn't working. The last light caught on a fish eagle's shoulder. Far off, a jackal let evening out of its throat, and I let nothing out because I'd learned to swallow everything years ago. I wrote down only this: practice makes reverence, then crossed it out because it felt like a lie.

I loved the high vantage of a vehicle because it kept me separate, safe, removed. Walks terrified me—too close, too vulnerable, too much humility required when all I had was pride barely holding me together. On water I learned to measure silence by how completely it exposed me, how every tiny movement felt like confession.

There were gentle laws and I followed them not out of reverence but fear: close the door quietly, lower your voice, accept you are not the main character. Guides were teachers I couldn't hear over my own thoughts. Rangers were keepers of stories I was too self-absorbed to listen to. I sat with hands open on my thighs not in peace but in defeat, attention scattered, breath shallow, nothing clean about any of it.

When the plane tipped its wing toward the long return, I pressed my forehead to the scratched window and watched the rivers unspool like silver handwriting that spelled out: you came all this way and you're still you. The savanna turned to geometry, then to color, then to a memory with weather I'd already started editing into something Instagram-worthy, something that proved the trip was worth it even though I knew, deep down, I'd learned nothing except how far you can run before you realize you're just running in place.

Back in the world of elevators and inboxes, I keep a handful of notes by the sink not as wisdom but as evidence of expensive failure. The way morning smells when the diesel cough stops. The quiet grammar of hooves in sand. The specific peace of knowing I am not alone, not separate, not first—except I was all those things, and no amount of safari could change it. If I forget, I close my eyes and let a far-off lion clear its throat, and I remember not how to belong, but how hard I tried and how completely I failed, and how the wild refused to fix me because it was never supposed to.