I hope that you are feeling better now. My suggestion, such as it is, would be that one could use a single in-ear head phone. These are not very easily visible and one ear would be there to listen to others, should they require any kind of assistance. Using this one can keep listening to books which interest one even when one in presence of other people. One could focus simply choose to focus on the voice emanating out of the head phone.
Second, you could think about getting a cheap GPS device so that you could keep track of the path back to the house. I assume, based on what you have said, that the forest close to your home is very big.
I recently came to know that Baudelaire was shipped off by his Army General step father to a city in India where I have myself spent many a sad day. ( He never reached the destination and ran away from the ship),I imagine him reaching that city and, after a couple of centuries, perhaps walking the same streets where Baudelaire might have walked .
I think the intensity and depth of my sadness would equal that of his heart’s.
The Carcass:
Remember that object we saw, dear soul,
In the sweetness of a summer morn:
At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion
On a bed with pebbles strewn,
With legs raised like a lustful woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,
Its belly, ripe with exhalations.
The sun shone onto the rotting heap,
As if to bring it to the boil,
And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature
All that together she had joined;
And the sky watched that superb carcass
Like a flower blossom out.
The stench was so strong that on the grass
You thought you would pass out.
Flies hummed upon the putrid belly,
Whence larvae in black battalions spread
And like a heavy liquid flowed
Along the tatters deliquescing.
All together it unfurled, and rose like a wave
And bubbling it sprang forth;
One might have believed that, with a faint breath filled,
The body, multiplying, lived.
And this world gave out a strange music
Like of running water and of wind,
Or of grain in a winnow
Rhythmically shaken and tossed.
Form was erased and all but a vision,
A sketch slow to take shape
On a forgotten canvas, which the artist finishes
From memory alone.
Behind the rocks a fretting
**** Looked at us with fierce mien
Anxious to retrieve from the corpse
A morsel that she had dropped.
Yet to this rot you shall be like,
To this horrid corruption,
Star of my eyes, sun of desire,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes, such you shall be, you, queen of all graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath the grass and waxy flowers,
To mold among the skeletons.
Then, oh my beauty! You must tell the vermin,
As it eats you up with kisses,
That I have preserved the form and essence divine
Of my decayed loves.
Charles Baudelaire