A Beast of the Forest

A Beast of the Forest

It's cold, yet my whole body is in a deep sweat. These forests are so dark that even a flashlight couldn't help me light the path ahead. However, this darkness makes me feel oddly safe; from what, I don't know for sure. Only a moment ago the day was bright; the light from the warm setting sun shone through the leaves of the trees in small beams of light. Don't mistake my use of moments as meaning hours or even minutes ago, but merely seconds ago. In fact, I remember the second before the whole world fell to darkness. I remember it like the back of my hand, not that such a metaphor would be very reliable.

As I was walking along a trail which went through the forest, my foot stepped on a branch, cracking in perfect alignment with the feeling that my ribs had collapsed into my chest. In a mere second, the pain which I felt disperse through my body was more complex than anything I'd ever felt. In one second, it was as if my mind and my body coexisted, memories and thoughts ran at a lightning-speed through my mind as I felt my physical self torn apart in a moment of time, a moment now millions of units of time in the past.

She was a beautiful girl, but when no one was around she was like a creature. I remembered what it was like as a child, maybe eight-to-twelve years of age, when both my parents worked over the summers. I was a youngling, and my sister was of age for things like driving and having sex. These are two things she didn't do much at first until a few years later, and as a result of her behavior one of her crazy ass boyfriends ended up killing her, which was all because she was going to tell the cops that he raped her.

She cried a lot in her final days, yet whenever I went up to comfort her she seemingly was a red demon... covered in water and slime, she'd grab me by the neck and hold me up. The power she felt in such a moment was immense, I could see it in how she looked at me. She pitied me, yet her pride was much bigger than this pity for the little man. She threw me against a coffee table in the old house, with my back hitting and breaking some wine glasses left by my parents. As I slid along, the shards went deeper into my back.

Going up my back, pain flowed and branched out across my back like a growing tree, with the feeling of ripping skin and muscle flowing the same way a river does. A river of blood formed, as the thick liquid poured down in solid lines. Lines..

Lord, I wanted it all so much. Who knew a little powder could be so powerful, make me feel immortal. It was a long time ago when it started, as a kid I went into the streets while my parents were away at work. I saw so many things, but most shockingly were the women. I used to pass by an area where two women, always dressing in a revealing way, would stand and just wait. Sometimes, a truck driver would come by and take one with him.

I met a similar woman, I saw her all bruised up in an alleyway crying. I was a kid, so I didn't know what she was rambling about when I sat by her. She said something about having a kid that she didn't want to let go, that's all I remembered before a big scary man dragged her into a car screaming and kicking. I just sat, I couldn't stop it so I just watched.

When he drove off, I noticed that the woman dropped a bag. It was a ziploc bag like the kinds my parents would put snacks in for me to take to school. I wasn't a complete idiot, I knew when I saw the product inside that it was coke. I'd seen Scarface come on the television, albeit it was during one of my sister's moments of hysteria. I decided I'd try it and God it was amazing..

I kept doing it, and never stopped. Shit, it felt nice to be on top of the world for a while. I remember in my junior year of highschool when this mindset was still in my mind trying to justify it. It was a dark and cold night, my plug was able to get me extra product since I had more money off the job I got at the time.

I did all of it soon after downing a bottle of bourbon, and soon before I knew it the world was on fire. Not literally, but that's how it felt. I stumbled outside onto the road, my shirt unbuttoned. I opened my mouth and I felt the salty taste of my own blood, a hint of cocaine in its flavor. It was a strange feeling I felt as I fell to the ground twitching, I felt like I was fighting myself. The vision I had blurred and then became clear, a cycle repeating over and over. My heart seemed to speed as my mind obsessed over its newfound feeling.

My chest felt as if it had built up enough pressure to explode, with every muscle that wasn't bruised and bleeding out being very tense and tight. I clenched my fists hard, tearing one of my veins with my arms tense and sudden movement. My chest arched forward as my shoulder flew back, a crunch which too was in sync with the branch on the ground. Most strange part of my arms is that my veins had already been sliced all the way up, I felt them already split.

In the emergency room, I was told that I had cut myself and gone into a violent fit. I didn't remember much, so the stitches all up and down my arm terrified me. I survived this ordeal, and years later it happened again. I was pulled from my college and fired from my job. Hell, very same week, my parents sent me to rehab to be treated for my cocaine addiction.

My arms were so bruised by the time I reached two months in that place. The white walls of the room were beaten up, the floor covered in my sweat and my hair. I'd even torn the bed apart, I couldn't help how much I wanted it. I didn't want to get off, no matter how much those men told me it could kill me. I was nothing without it, a low-life loser. While on it, I didn't care about what they thought- I could do anything, I was heightened. I took the fabric from my mattress and hung it up on the small light hanging from the ceiling. As the men rushed into the room, I jumped off my bed.

The skin on the back of my head tensed back-and-up in a way in which my ears usually follow, though my ears were unmoved. Well shit, the skin had been grabbed and pulled; explains the sheer pain I felt there as well. This pain went down and around my neck as the tearing flesh exposed the nerves within my body, the cold and dark wind blowing on them. I felt a series of stringy, vine-like progressions rush up my legs and pull on its hairs. They seemed to nest within milliseconds all up, feasting on my meat as if I were a fresh meal. As with my back, I felt streams of blood begin to drip down my flesh before all went to darkness.

Strange, I'm seeming to remember the wrong things. Who knows, at the end of the day, all this pain is merely pain. Pain will go away in the end, they tell me there's a better place I go to after death. Why the fuck would I not want to go there? Why would I not want to just cut my throat and arrive in a place where all this pain is gone.

My calf felt a sudden spring of penetrating pain, feeling like small roots spreading all through my lower leg's bloodstream. I couldn't feel my feet at all after a millisecond of chilling pain. I needed my feet to get away from that place, at any cost I had to escape just so I could be alive again. Merely a moment ago, my bare feet were crunching along the trail covered in rocks, branches, leaves, and vines... and now they felt as if they were never there.

A lack of pain is strange, yet I feel as though I'm at some inner peace. I can't be dead, I still hear myself think but I can't feel myself talk. I can still feel, although what I feel isn't what I felt before. I feel as though I'm surrounded by emptiness.. I'm spread out and sucking things in through my thinned out body. Hell, if I can call it that.. I don't feel like I'm in my body. It's strange, a feeling no man has probably ever felt before. What even am I now? A collection of thoughts apparently, somewhere away from the plan of Earth's life.

All I can say is that I wish to not be distubed now, for now I am where I've always wanted to be.