hot coffee girl

I had a bad dream.

In it, I must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. I thought that I was going for a rest, to stop for a moment and breathe in the fresh air and let the sun beat down on my face. I lay down and closed my eyes, stretching out.

When I opened my eyes, the sun had faded considerably. I thought that maybe it had just set for the day, as the sun always seems to do. I was surprised at how late the day had grown, but I did not worry about the diminishing light. I settled back into the soft grass and breathed deeply again.

It wasn’t until I woke up, restless from too much sleep, that I realized that it was much later (or was it earlier?) than I thought it was. My body told me that time had passed, too much time for the sky to still be as inky as it was. I shivered, as much from the absence of warmth that surrounded me earlier as from the creeping coldness that began spreading inside of me as well.

I took the sweater that was around my waste, and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders, shielding myself from the breeze that was starting to pick up. I looked around, trying to remember where I was heading, so I could continue on. I recognized nothing from earlier (hours? days?) when the daylight was still overhead. I walked ahead for a while, but I quickly grew tired again, and sat down against a tree. I began crying, although I wasn’t sure why exactly, before falling asleep again.

When I woke up, it was still dark out…darker somehow than I remembered. The stars that had blinked through the tops of the trees were all but gone, either faded or swallowed up by the blackness. I thought that I could still see one or two shining, but wasn’t sure if it was just the memory of them deceiving my eyes. In the distance, I heard voices softly laughing and talking, and I tried to head in that direction. Every time I thought that I was getting closer, the direction the sound was coming from seemed to change and I was no closer to finding the source of the merriment. After a while, I decided to just tune out the din, frustrated that I was unable to find its source. It became quiet again, except for the sounds of my tears, which seemed to come with more frequency and force. I sometimes wondered why the laughing, talking people couldn’t hear me if I could hear them. I finally decided that they had long ago tuned me out, as I had eventually done with them.

Was anyone looking for me, I wondered? How long had I been gone? Surely, it had been long enough for someone to have missed me. I thought about all of the people that I missed. I wondered if they missed me. Were they sick with worry or did nothing in their lives really change? I started to wonder if no one missed me or was looking for me how I would ever get back to where I was. As I curled up on a soft bed of moss, I let myself imagine if they weren’t looking for me, maybe they wouldn’t miss me if I never found my way out. Tears streamed down my face as I fell into a fitful, terrible sleep.

When I woke up with a start, I thought I sensed someone near me. It was so dark out now that I could barely see my hand in front of my face, nonetheless someone a few feet away. I called out to them, but all I could hear was their shallow breathing. I tried to feel around for them, to no avail. I stopped being able to hear the breathing, and it was so still I began to wonder if I had imagined them at all. If perhaps I wanted so badly to recognize someone in the dark that I had made them up altogether. I had long since lost a concept of time. But I sensed so many people out there at various points that I grew accustomed to them, almost thinking of them as ghostly company. I got used to the feeling that someone was watching me, someone who wasn’t in the dark … trying to scream to me, to get my attention…but I was too deep in the forest to be able to make out anything that they were saying.

It was sometime in the midst of listening for the voices that I realized it had snowed. I awoke one morning to a thin layer of the white powder covering me, so fine that I wondered if it was dust. Maybe it was a mixture of the two. It then struck me that I didn’t recognize it at first blush because it did not seem cold to me. I was not warm by any stretch, but I had just gotten so accustomed to the cold that it no longer seemed to chill me. The soft grassy beds that I had been sleeping on didn’t feel soft any more, and the rocks that I leaned up against no longer seemed hard. It all felt the same. The snow had no more effect on me that the lack of it had. I prided myself on becoming inured to the elements, not realizing how dangerous that condition would quickly become.

I was wandering around, long since having given up the search for the road out when I looked down and saw that I was leaving a trail of blood in the fresh snow. I sat down and tried to figure out where it was coming from, what part of me was spilling out onto the ground. I searched frantically over every part of my body, finding no mark, no gash, nothing that I could apply pressure to at least slow the outpour. I curled back up in a tiny ball, pulling my knees to my chest and drawing myself inside of me for protection.

I fell asleep again when the bleeding stopped, and I hoped that tomorrow I could find the trail that led out of this place. I dreamed of laughing and talking and the warmth of the sun on my face as I drifted off.

When I really did wake for the day, the sun was streaming in my windows and I could swear I heard birds chirping...almost like it was spring. I snuggled down in the covers, relieved I wasn't lost after all.