I climbed out the window and walked out to the road, still marveling at the abundance of stars visible outside of the city. The moon was full and far higher in the sky than it had been the first night when I had seen it. I was thinking about how in school we had learned how sailors used the stars to navigate. I never could quite understand that, because at home, the stars always seemed pretty hazy and indistinct. Now I could see how each one was clear, unmistakable from the next, even in the moonlight. I loved being outside at night. I tried to remember the pattern of the stars directly in front of me as I followed the road, using it as a map, but looking up while walking was tricky and was making me dizzy.
I actually felt kind of dizzy anyway; I had had a little bit of a headache all day but ignored it, figuring I was just stressed about my plan to leave. There was nothing I could have done about it anyway, it's not like we had any aspirin.
I followed the road as best I could. At times it was difficult to figure which way I should go, because the area seemed to be crisscrossed with lots of secondary roads. I figured people must come out here to hunt, and tried to always choose the more well-used looking road but those choices often made me feel as though I was just walking back in the direction from which I had come. I looked back up at the stars a few times and tried to remember what they had looked like in front of me when I had first left the church but by that point they all looked the same.
I felt like I had been walking for hours and was finding nothing, when suddenly I saw what looked to be a light off through the woods to my right. I stared at it, but in the dark it was difficult to judge distance. I thought it looked pretty close. By this point, my head was hurting and my legs did not want to move anymore, particularly the one with the cut. I looked toward the light and decided to take the shortest path possible to reach it. I stepped off the road and into the woods.
It was tougher than I had expected to cut through the woods, especially without real shoes. At times the ground would drop off suddenly and, in the dark, I could not judge the depth and ended up falling. I scratched my hands again and again on unseen bushes and bramble. No matter how much I walked, that light just never seemed to get any closer, and morning just never seemed to come.
Finally my legs could take me no farther, and I sat down to rest against a tree. It had to get light soon, I thought, and then I would be able to see where the light had been coming from. I decided to rest for a while and was sure that when the sun came up I would awaken and be able to get home. I fell asleep leaning against the tree.
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