Just a shadow

I was maybe 12 or 13 and going through a lot. At the time I was pretty severely bullied by people at school and my parents, and on the weekends, my cousins. I’m not sure exactly what was said or done, but someone had said something and I ran off into the woods crying. It was a warm day in late autumn, birds were singing, the sun was shining, and everything was bright. I walked past the fort my cousins had built, just out of sight of the camp, and pushed farther into the ravine. There was a small path, maybe a few inches wide, like a bike trail or deer path, that I was following. I remember walking all the way down to the creek bed and even following it for a while.

I didn’t notice the woods around me turning grey, like someone turned down the color saturation on an instagram picture. I didn’t notice how still and quiet the forest had become. What I did notice was someone calling my name. It broke whatever concentration I had on whatever it was that had me so enraptured, I honestly don’t remember, and all at once I realized that I needed to get out of the forest. Every instinct in my body was telling me to run, run out of the woods as fast as I could. I was shivering and tripping up the hill less than 30 seconds later. Apparently, I had wandered pretty deep into the woods, cause I came out on a trail about a 10 minutes walk away from my campsite. The sun was still shinning, the birds were still singing.

BBRae cosplay inspired by Gabriel Picolo’s art.