The forest was behind my house. There were no fences that separated the end of my yard from the hedge of it. The grass gently started to slop from short and well-maintained, to longer and unkempt, then weed started to sprout. All so gently that you couldn't really tell where it started. The bushes, then, suddenly, the trees blocked all the light.
All is dark in the forest, nothing enters that isn't already part of it. Nothing but shadows and cold. Between the trunks, the sun's rays die in the obscurity. There is nothing to fear from the forest, for what is inside never goes out.
Don't go to the forest, it will be painful and you're scared.
But I have to.
Nothing obligate you to.
So I lived my life, in the village, but it didn't matter. I knew my existence would only begin once in the forest. I had a home, I had friends, I had a job, but in my mind, I was living the before. Now was just the period that led to the beginning. How will I use all that life experience once in the forest? All that happened to me, I thought of it as forest currency.
I looked at it from my window every day. Nothing mattered really, until I would be in the forest.
I was afraid. Not much of the unknown, but because I knew it would be painful.
But you already went to the forest. It truly was the worst. Time does not exist anymore there, all senses exarcebate, each inch of your skin is an overacting nerve. You coward took a yarn ball with you. The worst part is: it wasn't even from changing your mind that you walked back, pulled the string , tossed the ball, once back, on the grass and burned it so no one would ever know.
No, it was because you felt the forest was consuming you. You couldn't control yourself, you were about to become the person who lives in the forest, and it disgusted you. It was not becoming a forest person that provoked that. It's because the forest person you imagined yourself to be, once there, would be glowing with light, luminous warrior hermit, philosopher king. But the truth of yourself was abject. The forest did not make you that way, it only ungloved it.
Suffering did not make you better. You do not have to be that person again by walking into the forest. There is nothing about the reality of that place that you crave.
Yet every waking hour of your life, as you walk, as you work, as you speak, as you lay, your mind is only thinking about the forest.
I do not belong to the forest, no one does, but I have to.
You can arm yourself before. You can plan, rationalize, but once in it, it will not matter. Nothing will go as you thought, and you know it. Arming yourself is only a way to force you to enter. To watch your sword and your shield and feel as if your mind is already made.
It will be the second time, the second time you never leave.
The forest is infinite, as you enter, as you push through its depths, the whole world becomes the forest. If you go back to the village, the house and the people will still be there, but the forest will have overgrown everywhere.
Of course, for them, it will still be the village as you know it now. And they will say, between them, sometimes in front of you; that you have changed. For they sense, without being able to tell, that you are still in the forest. But you will never want to go back to the village. There, you would crave the cold and the terror even more.
Why do you want it?
I have to.
But why?
Because it's the only way for me to truly live. All is slow and pillowy, there time and life matter.
But you are afraid, and already suffering just by thinking of it.
I do hate the forest for being ugly, and dark, and cold, and inescapable.
You're not even good at being in the forest. You will feel lonely there, there are hermits, a lot. None of them friends and all of them better at it. You will be mocked, you will be threatened. Hermits do not love overpopulation, and for thems it start with two peoples.
It's not even your mind telling you lies, it's a fact. You're not cut for the forest, but it's not because you're bad at something that it's not your calling.
So I chose the normal path. I shut down my chest and listened to my habits. I got a home closer to the village's center, I got a good job, I saw my friends, I followed the path the most travelled. It was agreeable on the outskirts of the large hole in myself. But it was life, it was not traumatizing.
Then one evening, as I went back home, I looked through the window, and the forest was there, just behind my house. It had followed me.
I got outside and sat on the grass. It was on a patch I was sure was still part of my lawn and not the forest yet.
So you are inescapable aren't you? Is that because I belong into you? That you have recognized me as worthy? Is it only the promise of a better life in the forest?
It was not. It was me who called it. The forest senses people who carry the yearning in them. So it follows them, but always waits for you to enter yourself. It was inescapable. The forest does not have a mind or a heart, it just is.
So inside the forest, I did go.