A Night Not Made for Sleep

I found a place near a fallen log with thick roots on one side and sat with my back against the wood as the light disappeared. The forest got dark fast once it decided to. One moment there were still shapes and shadows and then all that was left was just darkness and sound.

The sounds were wrong. They felt like none of the sounds I had a name for. High rhythmic insects I did not recognize. Something distant and hollow. Once, far off, a howl that was not a dog and was not a wolf and had a quality to it that made everything in me go still.

My heart had been running fast since sundown. I sat with my knees up and my arms around myself and did the only thing I could do, which was stay still and breathe and wait for the dark to pass.

The thoughts came because there was nothing to stop them.

I thought about my notebook on my desk at home. About the line I had written. About whether Aki had checked her messages yet. About my aunt coming home from work to an empty apartment and a cold plate of food and no note because I had not known to leave one. About whether anyone would know where to start looking.

They would not. There was nowhere to start looking. I had just vanished.

I pressed the back of my head against the log and stared up at the dark between the branches.

I had spent most of my life teaching myself not to want things too much because wanting things made you fragile. Then I had started to want things anyway. Slowly, carefully, against my better judgment. And now I was in a forest in a world I did not recognize, alone, cold, with no way back and no way to explain it.

The part I could not stop circling was that I had written it down. Tomorrow I will tell her. I had committed it to a page. I had believed it enough to do that. And then I had gone to sleep and woken up here.

"I was so close,"

I whispered to the dark.

Nobody answered. The insects kept their rhythm.

I pressed my fingers into my eyes hard enough to see shapes. I was not going to cry again. I was not because I thought it was weak. I was past caring about that. Just because I had already used everything I had on the field and there was nothing left for it.

Then I saw the creature.

Far off between the trees, pale and tall and moving in a way nothing solid moves. Too fluid. It moved like water moves, or smoke, or something that has not fully decided what shape it needs to be. I could not see a face. I could not tell what it was looking at. But it was oriented toward me.

I did not move.

My lungs stopped.

Every animal part of my brain that had been politely waiting its turn suddenly had the floor. This was not the fear of my father's footsteps in the hall or the fear of Shouhei waiting at the side entrance. That was human fear, manageable, something you could map and somehow predict. Even still this was older. The kind that does not use words.

I stayed completely still with my back against the log and watched it.

It did not come closer.

It stood between the trees and I sat against the log and we were in that position for long enough that my legs cramped and I did not dare move to ease them. Long enough that my eyes ached from not blinking properly.

Then I blinked once and it was gone.

Nothing dramatic. No movement, no sound. Just gone, the space between the trees empty again, same as any other space between any other trees.

I sat with that for the rest of the night.

I did not sleep. I tried once, around what I guessed was the middle of the night, and managed maybe twenty minutes before I snapped awake at some sound and my heart was back at full speed and there was no recovering from that. After that I just accepted the night as something to endure rather than something to sleep through.

I talked to myself. Quietly. Going through specific things: my name, my age, the school. The way the camphor tree looked from my desk. The café and the matcha latte. The bear on the windowsill. Haru pulling out the receipt. Aki saying that its okay like she had already decided it before I answered.

I held those things very carefully in the dark.

They were real. They had happened. Whatever this was, those things had still happened.

Morning came gray and cold. The dark between the branches went charcoal, then ash, then something that was almost light. My body ached everywhere. My mouth was completely dry. I sat for a while after it was fully light before I trusted my legs enough to stand.

I pressed both hands flat against the log for a second, feeling the realness of it.

Still here. Still me.

I started walking downhill because water runs low and I needed water more than I needed anything else.

The hunger came hard about thirty minutes in, it went directly past discomfort and straight into something more insistent. I found berries on a low bush and spent a while looking at them and then ate some. Sour and small. Not enough. I found a pale yellow fruit further on, long and easy to peel, and ate two of them and put a third in my pocket.

After maybe an hour the trees thinned and I heard water.

I pushed through a curtain of vines and there was a pond. Small, clear, fed by a stream at the far end. I dropped to my knees at the edge and drank until my stomach ached.

Then I sat back and looked at my reflection.

I looked terrible. That is just the honest assessment. Pale, hollow-eyed, hair stuck to my forehead, lips cracked. I looked like someone who had spent a night on the ground in a forest in a world that made no sense.

Which was accurate.

I sat by the water for a long time. The sun was moving up through the trees behind me, warming my back. The pond made a small continuous sound. Something moved at the far edge under the surface.

I thought about Aki.

Not strategically, not about what to do or how to get back. Just about her. The way she had said I was not scary the way people thought. The way she had waited through silences rather than filling them. The way she had put her hand on mine and not pulled back.

The grief of it was very quiet and very heavy at the same time.

I was not going to be able to tell her tomorrow. I did not know when tomorrow was going to be.

I stayed by the water and let that be true for a while without trying to do anything about it. Then I stacked some flat stones near the edge, I am not sure why, just to mark that I had been there, that I had found this place, that I was not just drifting.

The anger was still there underneath all of it. I had not forgiven this and I was not going to. Whatever had taken me here had done it at the worst possible moment and I was going to be angry about that for as long as I felt like being angry about it.

But anger alone does not keep you alive.

I stood up, drank one more handful of water, and looked at the trees on the far side of the pond.

"Okay,"

I said quietly.

Not to the world. Not to whatever had brought me here. To myself.

"Figure out what comes next."

I started walking towards my so-called future here.