Between the trees of the woods lingers a deep darkness; it creeps along and hides between the bark of trees and watches me as my feet crunch through last autumn's leaves. Like a million eyes watching, that darkness sees every blink of my eyes and every pulse of my heart seeping out like a rhythm through my veins. It sees my fingers begin to tremble as I sense its eyes watching me, and I know I'm not alone. The wind begins to sound like the rasping breathing of this monster-forest that somehow I have been lost inside. Between its gasps for air hangs a silence that is deafening, and my heart quickens with each step that I take. My eyes dart between trees and to every clump of underbrush, and every foreign sound sounds like a pair of footsteps stalking me. From underneath my tiny feet a mist rises from the ground. It wraps its icy fingers slowly around my toes, and then my ankles, forcing me to slow my hurried pace. It creeps up my calves and rests its fingers on my thighs, waiting for me to succumb to its sickening touch. But my eyes just grow wide in fear as the path before my feet grows hazy and then slowly disappears. I open my mouth in a silent scream, and the mist jumps down my throat and fills my lungs, and I fall, silent.
Now the beating of my heart has stopped, and my heart grows cold and blue. My fingers curl as tendons tighten, and my lips no longer smile. The mist turns into fog and covers up my skin. No eye, no heart, no beast, no bird can see the still form lying in the frosted leaves--hiding the shameful nakedness of the forest floor. But my eyes see me lying there, the fog condensing on my skin--grasping greedily every drop of heat my body held so dear. I feel so cold, so numb, so dead--so excruciatingly sad. I see myself from a distance; I'm no longer alive, but dead. The fear that always lurked inside my head somehow escaped into my veins; my heart believed its lies, and stopped; my eyes believed the eyes it saw, and closed eternally; my ears believed they heard my murder, so they refused to hear the words of life. And when I died I saw the truth, the lies I had believed. My soul is chained into this tree, my eyes fixed on the spot I lay, doomed to watch my flesh decay, my eyes roll back, my bones reign free. Oh that I had that life to live, I would live it oh so different. Fear would not deceive me so, and darkness wouldn't scare me so; the heights of canyons wouldn't make me tremble so, and the loss of love wouldn't make me so afraid to love.
We all have days we wish we could change--that we wish we could go back and re-live, but without the lessons of wrong days past, we would never survive the days to come.
