My legs are heavy and I barely feel my arms anymore. My head blares continuously and the voices sound like a distant echo in my skull. This life doesn't belong to me; my soul is stuck in a body that hasn't belonged to me for a long time. Maybe it never did. I'm not ill. Just tired, endlessly tired of these voices whispering over and over again: “There is no escape.” No escape from what? From this leaden burden on my shoulders? Or from this endlessly repetitive vicious circle that gives me the same pain day after day?

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I'm walking alone in the woods. A cool autumn day, but the sun warms me enough. I like to go here; the forest relieves my head, eases the tangled thoughts that sit deep in my chest every day. I don't like the word “difficulty.” “Heavities” would be more honest, because everything is heavy. But here, between the trees, this heaviness seems lighter for a moment. There is no meaning, alright, I agree with Friedrich Nietzsche on that, but the meaninglessness doesn't bother me here. Here, it is just there, like the wind, like the rustling, like the light that falls through the branches.

I am thinking of the infinite void, of the nihilism that Nietzsche warned us against breaking in. Or rather wanted to warn? I believe nihilism has has entered long time ago. No, I don't belief so, because God is dead. I know that nihilism has entered a long time ago. I see it in the eyes of people who only have dollar signs shining. They're holding this square thing that screams, flashes, vibrates. When I ask them “Why?”, they shrug their shoulders. Sometimes I get dizzy when I'm standing among them, these robots. I'm one of them, but I think they programmed me in a wrong way. I speak another language and I see differently. Is my perspective the wrong one or theirs? Am I sick or are they? “You don't belong here,” I hear my teacher's voice. I was seven back then. Maybe I'm really sick.

A red squirrel sits a little further away. You barely see them anymore. Their world is dying, tree by tree, so that the industrial building can grow. Poor squirrel, I think. Poor paws. Poor forest. Everything is affected by nihilism as if by a parasite. And the nihilistic parasite is efficient: one cut and it's all over. The squirrel whizzes up the trunk. Further ahead, a fox, its eyes light up at me like two tiny mirrors. But as soon as I take a step, it's gone. It's all over.

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I keep going and I come to a huge oak tree. It stretches its crown into the sky like a cathedral, maybe a thousand meters, maybe only twenty. Measures blur. Can that oak tree tell me what's waiting for us up there? Void. I'm moving on. I don't know how long. I don't like relying on time. They used to say, “Your time will come.” I never understood what time they meant or how it should come. Today I know that it was a lie. They barely ever said anything else. These robots.

There is the oak tree again. That can't be the case. I've already passed by it. The big oak tree. I must have been wrong. I'm going on, the same way back. But there it is again. I'm pausing. Turn me around. Go faster. The oak tree. I'm going backwards. The oak tree. I close my eyes and walk blindly through the undergrowth, feeling roots, thorns, branches. I open my eyes. The oak tree. I'm getting down on my knees. It stands in front of me unchanged. I roll across the forest floor, soil stuck under my fingernails, moss squeezing into my face. But when I look up: the oak tree. I realize that no matter what I do, this oak tree is waiting. I'm trapped. In this forest, in this body, in this life. Every path leads back to it. Each step is repeated. I slap my fists on the rind, but nothing changes. I scream into the dark forest but no one hears me. There is no one there.

And suddenly, between my hectic breaths, I no longer hear the voices in my head, but a sentence that breaks away from the depths of my memory. Like the leaf that falls from a branch over there. “You must live this life, as you are living it now, again and countless times.” Nietzsche. The demon. The biggest heavyweight. I stare at the oak tree as if it had whispered this sentence to me. Maybe it has, maybe it's the demon.

I wipe dirt off my face and watch the moonlight fall through the crown of the oak tree. What if this return isn't a coincidence? What if it's a question? I'm taking a step back. The air smells of soil and cold. My heart beats faster, but not because of fear. More because something lifts up in me, like an animal that has slept too long. So a question: Can I bear coming back to this exact point over and over again? Would I want this life, every tiredness, every mistake, every despair again? And then again and again? And infinitely often?

Turn thoughts into my head. I hear my teacher again, the other students and finally my grandmother: I'm not one of them here. And I could run, run away from anything, from the oak tree. I could pretend I've never seen it and live a lie. But I can also stay.

I sink to the ground, very carefully at first. The earth below me is cold, but it sustains me. I lean my back against the oak tree and my gaze wanders into the night sky. I sit there leaning against the oak tree and breathe. Deep in, then out again. I'm just breathing. Not nice or calm, but I'm breathing. And as I sit there, I feel the voices calm down, the voices that have been loud for so long. If I keep coming back to the oak tree, it's probably because it's the only one that understands me. I don't have to pretend for the oak tree, I don't have to explain myself to it. And that's when I realize for the first time that an eternal return might not mean being trapped. Maybe it means that you find places in life that feel familiar to you and where you simply may be. Which you can also stick to. My scratched hand strokes the rough bark and it feels like the wounds are healing.

A small, weak “yes” is created somewhere in me. Not a big “yes” to life, but a “yes” to this moment. To the oak tree. About me, and for a moment, it's enough just to be there.

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Giulia Romina Itin was born near Lucerne in 2007 and is currently studying philosophy and history at the University of Basel. In her texts, she deals with existential and sociocritical questions: meaning and meaninglessness, rebellion, identity, the dreamy, and resistance to the preformed. Her thinking is shaped primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, whose perspectives on freedom, revolt, and absurdity sharpen her attention to the fractures of the present day. In addition to studying, Giulia writes poetry and prose so as not to fall silent inwardly in a meaningless world. For her, writing means continuing to ask questions where others are silent.

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The article image was paine by Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series.