I am alone.

I think.

I hope.

I pray.

The darkness follows me through the day, just as it envelops me in the night. Everything changes, but still, each morning I wake up in the same forest, I believe.

My surroundings altered every day, but their eerie silence never changed. I had forgotten everything. I had forgotten my hope. Cowering in my tent, waiting for the sounds of something bustling about to fade. I was sure I’d never escape.

I woke up, foraged for necessities, and hid like a startled squirrel in my shack of a home when the Thing That Made Noise did what was implied.

Then, one day, I started to look upward. At the stars; the only light in my veil of darkness. They too would change, but I soon realized the pattern- somehow, someway, I kept hope.

I took a piece of tree bark one night and etched a map of the stars I could see into the side of my tent.

I feared that I may fall asleep, and wake to nothing; to have it all be gone. But it wasn’t. I would have yelped in joy.

Now my tent is covered in the marks of a thousand bits of broken bark.

The tent was like a chamber that amplified every little sound. Every crack of a twig on the forest floor and every rustle of leaves in the wind was magnified.

I’ve been very quiet. I have to be. Every day, the forests’ sounds grew louder, and I always knew that 

(the)

some thing was near. But I didn’t go out at night either, I wasn’t stupid. I had no reprieve from my suffering.

So much time had passed. I even forgot my name. 

I’m not even sure I had a name. I couldn’t remember a single thing. Not one vague recollection.

After such perennial torture, I feel inhuman. I drink water from streams, eat berries from trees, and have never gotten ill. Over time, my hunger and thirst have diminished, but I’ve never felt starved.

And there weren’t any other forest creatures or people. I remember hearing rustling about the forests during the day, but it was never a deer, or a bird, or even a squirrel. No insects either. 

I’ve become used to the lack of life. I relish it. I don’t need it, even. 

Dirt covers my skin, and plants poke at it instead of insects. 

Tree branches claw my skin instead of bears. 

Leaves rustle in the wind without them. 

And branches crack for no apparent reason. 

It’s just me, and my thoughts. 

But those have vanished, too. 

Night 745

I have tried this for weeks. Every night that the Thing That Made Noise didn’t make any. 

Every time, I fall asleep, and wake up with my face in the dirt, leaning outside of my tent. 

I knew when the sun would set and would devise an arduous plan. I had no watch, so I’d count to sixty in several groups. For instance, one night, the sunset at 6:41. I first counted to sixty, sixty times, for one hour. I did it again, grabbing plants, dirt, and wood and tossing it into the air. 

The hours were passing, picking up pace, trying to outrun the night. I tried to follow, but the ground clung to my skin. 

I heard something, very near, and hid back in my tent. Deciding I would rather live to see another day than finish seven minutes, I stayed quiet (easily) and fell asleep.

It was 11:59 and 37 seconds.

I was praying with every remaining fiber of my being, that this would work.

I was becoming very tired, but I couldn’t stop.

Whenever I had started feeling sleepy, I would seize a pointy branch I had placed at my feet. The sharp pricks would dig into my soft flesh, but they fulfilled their purpose well.

It was so dark. Every instinct told me to go hide in my tent. I kept hearing things, but they were so far away that I ignored them.

I wanted this to work. I wanted to escape; to see if I could flee, and not end up back in my tent, in a forest, and never know that I may have been only a few days' journeys from salvation.

Time wasn’t slowing. The moment was rushing towards me like a freight train, ready to bowl me over. Would I be right? Could I be right? I had no time to answer the questions that I had asked over and over and over, to no one but myself.

52… 53… 54… 55… 56… 57… 58… 59

...60.

I didn’t blink. [I wouldn’t]

I didn’t breathe. [I couldn’t]

I felt down at my feet.

The branch was still there.

The trees looked the same.

I hadn’t left at all.

I wanted to shout, but couldn’t.

I stretched my tired arms up to the wooden towers, closed my eyes, and delighted in my first victory in two long, forlorn years. 

I opened them again, to a soul-crushing sight. 

In three seconds, the magnificent oaks had been replaced with dark, bare pines. In three seconds, the branch had vanished. In three seconds, the air had turned warm and peaceful. In three seconds, night had changed to day.

It reminded him of an old saying, once so strange, yet now so true.

“Nothing Is, was never Was, and so shall never Be.”

Night 746

This was not the first time I considered what would happen if I did. I wondered if I might go to the Great Beyond. Or maybe I was already there, and would just disappear.

I held the crooked tree bark in one clenched, but a shivering fist.

The shudders had resumed. The emotions were welling back up. I had to clamp down on their uproar.

When I first sliced open my muddy and dirt-caked skin, I thought, hey, that feels much better! and I tried to tell myself why.

Originally, I told myself that maybe I had bad blood, and by blood-letting, I was curing myself of my strange, powerful, raw emotions.

Next, I deceived myself. This was during this time when I believed I was in the afterlife (that idea had been shifted to the back of the line, after the fits), and so when I cut myself, instead of pain, I felt nothing, because I couldn’t feel pain. 

But in the end, I knew that it just made me feel good.

Once again, I found myself wondering what would happen if I just dug the bark into my wrist, and let it be that. 

But the debate had become so monotonous that I didn’t even care all too much.

I turned my arm over, and dug the bark into the back of my hand with violent strength, and tore it out, tearing off more skin. The bark was soaked in blood. A new scar would join the several more on my left arm. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I could combine my ‘pain-relief’ with my mapping of the stars, to create a better map.

I had traced over the faded scratches of previous etches with thick red ink, and, slowly but surely, the pieces were falling into place. There was but a foot of space without any marks.

Maybe there was a way out.

I poked my head out of the tent flap and stared up at the stars. They were all different colors, which made it easier for me to pick out the ones I had noted last night. I ran back, marked down a couple of positions, poked my head back out, and repeated, moving around with expert ease.

On the fifth trip, I heard a loud crack. I saw the dark outline of a branch, snapped off a sycamore tree, not ten feet away. I hurriedly retreated, quietly writing my last notes, before cowering in the corner where I slept, hoping the Thing That Made Noise wasn’t there. 

Night 747

It’s early dawn. My opportunity. I could see through the thin stretches of the tent, rubbed away by wooden shavings. I crouched on my hands and knees cautiously. My body, stiff, my heart, pounding. I knelt there, for maybe a minute or two. I knew I’d have to go fast. There wouldn’t be much time.

I sneaked out into the stretch of grass around the tent entrance, surrounded by trees. I tried to keep the steps of my small, pale feet silent. The cool morning chill would make anybody else shiver, but my chicken-limbs have grown to resist it.

Today- or this day’s forest-, the trees around me were Mongolian Oak of the Aokigahara forest. How ironic. And yet, as I looked through the ring of trunks surrounding him, I spotted what I vaguely recognized as a Holly bush, with bright red clumps of radiant berries.

I stopped for a moment to feel the breeze on my pores, still managing to chill me to the bone. I ran a hand over my scalp, feeling for any short bristles, but came to nothing. I took a tentative step forward, my legs stiff, but light.

As I tried to steady them, the sounds of my breath were like the echoes of water, dappling leaves.

My teeth, hard and cold, like small ice cubes.

I bent my knees slightly, trying to see better.

And trying not to be seen.

And then I realized that I was taking no breaths.

The sounds of the wind blew into my ears, suffocating them, creating that illusion.

Hesitating then no longer, I leaped forward, my feet landing purposefully on tree roots, making small, damp clunks.

I landed in front of the Holly bush, my arms and legs coated in a cold sweat. I greedily grasped two red berries and tore them from their stems. Their fellows swished about, and then stopped.

Holding one in each palm, I raised them to my forehead and crushed them.

Their juices seeped over my face, down my nose, and over my chin. A single drop of the liquid fell from my eyebrow, and for the briefest of moments, my vision turned a bright red.

I felt the warm, sticky droplets slide down the creases of my face, dripping from my chin onto the ground or my chest, clearing away layers of grime.

I looked down into the slowly enlarging puddle at my feet, seeing my cold, brown eyes reflected there, a raspberry red.

My skin, oily.

My nose, twitching like a rabbits’ in the sting of the air.

I moved (dragged) my dead-weight foot faster than I had in a long time, and smashed it into the puddle. A few drops stirred the soft dew, making the grass quiver. I jumped and hit the back of a tree.

I may not have moved with much force, but many leaves fell onto my head, and I braced myself to be showered with rainwater, as this forest was very wet.

I noticed that the world around me had been flickering, in and out. It started maybe twelve days ago. It happened five days after that. Then four. Then three days later, on this day, which was like all other days. It will happen two days from now. 

Will it happen when I sleep? Will I awaken? 

A noise burst from the silence, exploding in a massive multitude of strident sounds that ricocheted off of trees. It was the sound of a thousand animals at once, as though their sounds had been delayed by years until that moment, when the world around him broke open, spilling its many hidden contents. 

It didn’t phase me, however.

It wasn’t real.

I blinked and brushed it away, and it left like I had been rude to it. The world had reoriented itself.

But now the leaves were dry, and as my dirty feet pressed down, thunderous cracks struck my heart, striking me because it was very real. 

Suddenly, as though a great light was shone directly upon me, I felt invisible eyes observing me.

The animal, caught in a trap.

The Thing That Made Noise.

I backed up into the tree, staring at the bushes for a long time. The eyes were still watching. And watching. And watching. And then they weren’t.

My hands were scrabbling at the thick tree bark behind me, as though I might be able to climb it to safety.

My body was twitching and spasming, the cold winds finally winning the battle, biting at my tight skin, beating down on my lungs. Twisting my organs, suffocating them in a blanket of frost-bitten fear.

And then a large shape arose from the bushes and froze me with its silence.

What must have been the Thing That Made Noise had dirty, parchment-colored skin, tight around its body, making every tendon and muscle bulge. I felt my muscles standing out, though I had no intention to fight. It stood on four thin brownish legs which ended in two blade-like points. I could see that it had pierced a large hole in a tree trunk emerging from the dirt. Its body was like a human’s, resting at a ninety-degree angle. Its stomach sagged, but not nearly as much as its roaring chest, which, like a fearsome lion, puffed out with a seemingly endless amount of muscles. Its neck was barely thicker than its legs, which now two of them were raised as if it wanted to clap. And then its face. It had no nose; it had no ears; it had no eyes. But it had hair. Dark brown hair. Dark brown hair with dirt and bark and twigs and grime. Dark brown hair that was wild and unruly, but seemed to flatten like the fur of an angry cat. Lastly; the teeth. It had two rows of teeth, one on top, one on the bottom. They were white. Most of them were square. It was smiling. But the teeth were crooked and some were jagged, as though they had been shaved away by a knife. These chiseled spots revealed small patches of a black and red mouth, which looked to be completely dry. And the outline of its mouth (not lips, it had no lips) was grotesque in its size, and its shape too was imperfect, dipping in and curving out, making it seem as if its smile was moving, twisting and spinning, as its head danced. 

It had hair.

He had no hair

It had a mouth

He no longer had a mouth.