CW: This story contains sneaky Ericksonian Storytelling induction techniques, and no awakener, so please be warned it’s not one to be read before operating heavy machinery, or if you don’t fancy trancey language right now.
• The pine needles shift and rustle under your feet. The sound breaks the overwhelming quiet. Why don’t you hear birds? Why don’t you hear a
You had heard stories about the paths in these woods. People said that they made no sense.
Maybe they had made sense once, but the trees and ferns had shifted around them, and a mossy carpet had grown over what once joined them to the outside world.
But, weirdly, it was these stories that tugged at you more than anything. What kind of survival instinct is that? Is this a new form of nihilism? Some new way to be forgotten by the world, to be taken away by the leaves and spores? To make a new life in the liminal spaces between ancient trees and trickling rivers? Is that what it’s come to?
But It Does Sound Nice, you think, as you haphazardly pack your bag, feverishly wondering what you might need. Snacks, a drink, maybe some cigarettes? Maybe your phone, but it feels like it cheapens things.
You remember you took some moss from the edge of the woods some months ago. It’s still there, living in a jar, being kept on your desk in a way that feels presumptuous. The audacity of it knits in your stomach. You push the jar into your pocket, trying not to look at it. An offering, or an apology. It works either way. You decide to sweeten the deal with a shiny rock, and something you wove with your fingers when you were sad. You feel like you would like that if you were a forest.
It’s dusk when you get there, the trees yawning out to greet you. The rest of the world goes to sleep, and quiet falls around you. A rustle in the thicket catches your ear, and you glance up to see a fox staring right at you, a gleam bright in his eyes. You cannot break it, the thread holding you to this stolen moment, of feeling undeservingly sought out by something you could never understand. He blinks, slowly. You bow your head. And serenely, he steps away, his feet soundless on the bracken floor.
You kneel carefully, gently lifting a handful of leaves to a sight you remember well. A patch of moss, as wide as your footprint, with a bald spot. You reach into your pocket, and scoop out the stolen piece. It leans into its old home, as you pat down the edges. You bury the rock beside it, and lay the tangled web of wool on top. Your stomach softens, and you walk on.
The air is thicker here, each step stirring earth and spore, and deeply composted leaves. The entropy catches everything here, pulling it back into the cycle. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is left dead. The most decomposed matter is the most alive, as potent as any matter could be. Each patch of moss is its own tiny forest, each trickle of rainwater its own ambling stream. The sense of scale is baffling, feeling impossibly large whenever you look down, but always towered over by ancient trees.
You realise that decay is a lying concept. Wrapped up in ego, the idea that the breaking down of things is their own undoing. But here, the earth is rich in promise, full of what once was and what could be. The thick and fertile scent of earth and spore, of tiny emissaries of the web beneath your feet. A network of tiny fibers woven together through the soil.
Your thoughts dampen with every breath, a heavy muffle settling on your mind. It sinks more with every step, and you dimly notice yourself going deeper.
And as you go further, the steps come more easily. Like a drunken, downhill amble, you find your surroundings sliding by, folding past you in ways that probably don’t make sense.
The path was never really there, a quiet part of your brain thinks. After all, you’ve been following something else for a while now. The path of least resistance, you guess.
The sounds are muted, soft, and strange. A dark, inky blue bird chuckles to himself, watching you trying to make sense of it all. You spot him, and he chirps like a bird. He is gone before you blink.
And still, with each step easier than the last, your feet inevitably fall where they should, no thought behind them. The trees are bending around you now, beckoning you, folding in line behind you. They reach up, enclosing above you. They form a tunnel, a web of tendrils, of lichens and mosses knitting around the edges.
The edges are blurring, your gaze is softening. Each blink is heavier, and each breath is longer. The crunch of leaves is long behind you, softened by a carpet of moss. You don’t know when you last made a sound.
As you breathe deeper still, your vision drifts. You don’t miss it. As the greens and browns merge, you feel safer, softer, gently at peace.
The scent of the earth hangs in every breath. The ground is warm, the breeze a heavy blanket.
Your feet, which had been so obliging and light till now, are starting to weigh you down.
You’ve come so far, you’ve done so well.
And look, here, framed perfectly in knotted roots, a bed of moss. It’s always been here, waiting.
If you laid down here, you would grow roots, you know.
It would be so easy to lay your heavy head down in peace and quiet. In perfect stillness and softness, to lay down gently and breathe so deeply.
To reach out into the earth, to grow down into the dark.
janainaart
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
2087
