The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry.

— Aspen Matis

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.

— Aspen Matis

The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.

— Aspen Matis

This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them. Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life.

— Aspen Matis

This was trail magic. Sea Breeze’s fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. It isn’t a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere.

— Aspen Matis

Though I was starved for contact, I didn’t stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.

— Aspen Matis

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.

— Aspen Matis

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.

— Aspen Matis

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.

— Aspen Matis

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain. But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.

— Aspen Matis