Esther had very specific plans of how she wanted to leave this location. I would never stop hearing about her idea to buy a van and travel from coast to coast. With England as her country of origin, she wanted to make her own opportunity to explore the States, hopefully meeting new and quirky individuals in between.

She wanted to live off the land, and essentially become one with nature. She had a disdain for technology, wanting to live as minimalist as possible—while she had a phone device, it was without a SIM card to maintain her intense want of privacy. Needless to say, the woods were her favorite place to explore and walk around.

She didn’t quite know what to do after college, but I always thought that her love of animals could have guided her to a potential career. Something artistic would have worked just as well, as she was also a fantastic painter, never ceasing to come up with new ideas and tools to use for her work. Whether it was blacklight paint, or pieces of a deer skeleton she found in one of her many adventures in the woods, she was chock full of ideas, but with little room or time to do anything with them.

While some of her other close friends and I were aware of her mental health issues, we were still unprepared for what was to come later. Out of nowhere, Esther had disappeared, and was eventually officially reported as missing. Less than 24 hours later, with no word, she was found to have hung herself in the woods, carrying no note and completely alone.