Redwood Crown, Lithium Bones

ACT I : The Mania - The Forest - The Becoming

I was born under a redwood tree, or at least I told the EMT that when they found me barefoot and singing.

They wrapped me in a blanket like I was breakable, but I was still vibrating from the storm inside me. I’d been chasing moonlight through the ferns for three nights—maybe five. I lost count after the stars started winking at me like they were in on the secret. I told the ravens they could perch on my shoulders. I told the spiders their webs were maps. I told God I forgave her.

They say the woods are dangerous if you don’t know your way. But I did. I knew every root, every bend, every place where the moss grew softer. I named myself Queen of the Pines and crowned my head with dried eucalyptus and stolen twine. My kingdom stretched as far as my heartbeat.

There was a day—if you could call it that—when the fog poured in like milk, and I found a wedding dress snagged on a branch. It was torn at the hem, dirtied at the sleeves, and perfect. I put it on over my sports bra and hiking boots and declared myself holy. Every branch bowed. The ground hummed beneath me. The air tasted like yes.

I built a shrine from pinecones and my own hair. I wove it into a spiral, the way I remembered from a dream that may have been a memory. I left offerings of river rocks and honey packets from my backpack. I whispered into the altar, and I swear it whispered back.

The birds started speaking to me after the third day. Jays, mostly. Loud little things with something urgent to say. They flitted just ahead of me like guides, flashing blue through the trees, reminding me where the path was—and where it wasn’t. I followed them until my feet bled.

There was a redwood tree with a split trunk like a mouth mid-scream. I sat between its ribs and listened. I was sure God lived there. Not in the biblical way, but in the mycelial way. Underground and humming. A divine rot, rebirthing.

I hadn’t eaten in maybe two days? Maybe more? It didn’t matter. Hunger made me lighter. Hunger made me fly. I believed I could photosynthesize if I just laid still enough. I turned my face toward the canopy and waited.

They found me in the clearing near dusk. A man in a neon jacket stepped into my cathedral of moss and bramble. He called my name like it belonged to him. I laughed. I told him, “I was born here.”

He didn’t understand. He tried to offer me water. He tried to take my hand.

I ran.

Branches clawed at my arms like they wanted me to stay. Like they were trying to stitch me into the forest itself. My dress caught. Tore. I kept running. My body was a psalm. My lungs a prayer. Every heartbeat was proof that I still belonged to something.

But the woods were starting to turn on me.

The jays were screaming now. Not speaking—screaming. The trees leaned too close. My breath came sharp, ragged. The spiral I’d made was gone, or maybe I’d only imagined it. The forest floor was tilting. I couldn’t tell if I was sinking or falling.

The man caught up to me eventually, but I don’t remember what he said. I just remember the sound of the velcro on his medical bag, and the feel of the blanket he wrapped around me. They always do that—wrap you in something soft when they’re about to take you away.

“They said I was in danger,” I told them. “I said I was finally free.”

I closed my eyes and tried to memorize the smell of bark, the hush of needles underfoot, the way the sun hit the mist just right like a halo. I tried to remember the feeling of being a girl made of myth.

I don’t remember the ambulance. Just the white light. And the sudden, horrible quiet.

ACT II: The Stabilization - The Coast - The Exile

I wear sunscreen now and take my meds with mango juice. Time moves in smooth, manageable increments. Morning stretches into afternoon without any voices in the trees. The sun warms my shoulders, and no one watches me too closely anymore.

They say I’m doing great. Everyone is so proud of me. I’m a brochure girl now—beachy recovery chic. I drink decaf coffee. I listen to mellow indie playlists on shuffle. I’ve learned to nod in groups. I journal my “gratefuls” with a pen that doesn’t run. I make eye contact and speak at an appropriate volume. I apologize for things I didn’t do.

They call it stability. I call it silence.

My apartment overlooks the ocean. There’s a white noise machine in my bedroom and a lavender oil diffuser in the kitchen. I have curtains that match the couch. On good days, I wipe down the counters. On better days, I leave the windows open and let the sea breeze in, pretending it’s enough.

I go surfing now because the ocean can’t be set on fire. Believe me—I tried.

I used to think the waves would cleanse me, or baptize me, or crack me open like the forest did. But the ocean is indifferent. It doesn’t hold me. It just pulls and spits and retreats. I stand on my board, trying not to fall, and everyone on the beach claps like that’s progress.

I miss the sting of salt in my eyes.

In group therapy, I say things like: “I’m learning to sit with discomfort.” I doodle flowers in the margins of my worksheets. I don’t draw trees anymore. I don’t want anyone asking questions.

At my last check-in, my therapist said, “You’re out of the woods now.”

I smiled. That’s what I’m supposed to do. Smile and nod. Let them write it down in the chart.

Improved affect.

Insight intact.

Compliant with medication regimen.

But the truth is, I left something behind.

The moss. The birds. The god-tree with the split trunk. The hum of the earth under my feet.

They called it psychosis. I called it prophecy.

No one wants to hear that. They want you to talk about

“moving forward,”

“reframing the past,”

“trusting your support system.”

They want to clip your wings and then thank you for walking.

I don’t run anymore. I walk. I stay hydrated. I sleep eight hours. I set reminders for things that used to be instinct. I swallow stability with a smoothie and pretend I don’t taste the absence.

Sometimes, I dream of the forest. It’s always dusk there. Always soft. The light catches on spider webs like threads of gold. I dream of the birds saying my name. I dream of branches reaching for me like arms. I wake up crying into 800-thread-count sheets.

“You’re out of the woods,” they keep saying.

But the coast doesn’t cradle me like the forest did.

The beach is beautiful, sure. Picture perfect. But everything here is beige and polite. No one howls. No one bleeds on purpose. No one believes in anything you can’t post about on Instagram.

And God? She’s not here. Not in the seafoam or the sunbathers. Not in the vanilla lotion everyone smells like. Not in the yoga class with ocean view affirmations. If she’s here at all, she’s quiet.

Sometimes I sit on my balcony and whisper into the wind just to see if anything whispers back.

It never does.

The hardest part isn’t the loss of chaos. It’s the exile. I was something else out there. Something terrible and tender and luminous. The kind of alive that makes your skin ache. Here, I am small. Palatable. A girl-shaped container for the right decisions.

They say I’m healing. They say I’m home.

But no one asks what it cost to get out of the woods.

ACT III: The Crash - The Ward - The Return

The hallway hums like Sunset Boulevard, minus the traffic and the girls in fur coats. The vending machine light buzzes blue like a motel vacancy sign. Everything smells like bleach and the absence of feeling. The morning is cold, the kind of cold that seeps into your gums. I shuffle down the corridor in hospital socks, and the linoleum squeaks under me like it’s warning someone I’m coming.

The doors don’t lock from the inside.

The nurses speak softly, like I’m made of something more breakable than before. I am. I think I am. I’ve stopped answering to my name, not out of defiance, but because I don’t recognize it. When they call me, I think: She’s not here.

My reflection is a stranger in a borrowed face.

The psych ward isn’t a hospital to me. Not really. In my mind, it’s a city with no skyline. Just long halls that loop in on themselves, like downtown LA after midnight. Everything is kind of wet and glowing. Exit signs blink like dying stars. The nurses wear tennis shoes instead of stilettos, but they walk the same.

There’s no forest here, but sometimes I pretend the soap dispenser is a pinecone, just to see if the world will glitch. It never does.

I haven’t cried since I got here. Not really. I’ve made the motions. Wiped at my face. Said, “I’m tired,” when they asked what was wrong. But the sob—the real one—is stuck somewhere under my ribs, curled up in fetal position and refusing to come out.

A tech hands me a paper cup with my meds. I take them. Not because I want to, but because I’ve learned there are easier ways to disappear. Compliance is currency here. A smile is worth more than a scream. No one wants to hear you scream in a place like this. It echoes.

In the dayroom, a woman talks to the ceiling fan like it owes her money. Another man paces and hums the same five notes over and over again. A chorus of ghosts, trying to tune their instruments. I sit in the corner and trace the grooves of the chair beneath my fingertips. Plastic, not wood. Smooth, not splintered. I miss the forest.

They said I was out of the woods.

But no one told me what to do with a heart that blooms in chaos.

No one told me how to live in a world that only wants you tidy, sedated, smiling at your follow-up appointments with a mood tracker app and an emotional support water bottle.

No one told me how to come back.

I’m not suicidal. I just… don’t know how to be this version of myself. The safe one. The small one. The one who watches the world from behind shatterproof glass and tries to remember what it felt like to believe in magic.

Down the hall, I see her—the nurse with the tree tattoos. They’re small, delicate, crawling up her wrist like ivy. Oaks, maybe. Or ash. I want to ask her if she’s ever been to the woods. The real ones. The ones that speak.

I whisper to her, soft and cracked: “Do the woods know I’m gone?”

She looks at me like she almost understands.

Later, I sit in a hard plastic chair beneath the humming lights, and something inside me finally splinters. I break open like a dropped plate, no crash—just a slow cracking. I sob for the girl in the trees. The one no one came looking for. The one they only found when she stopped singing and started screaming. The one they called delusional when all she ever wanted was to be heard in a language the world had forgotten.

They never saw the girl in the trees.

They only saw what came after.

The quiet. The compliance. The flattened smile of a girl who learned how to be safe by being silent. The good patient. The ghost.

I cry until my whole body aches, and no one interrupts me. No one tries to fix it. For once, that feels like something close to kindness.

When I finally look up, I notice it.

A thin crack in the floor near the baseboard. It’s nothing. Just a scuff in the vinyl. But in my mind, it’s moss. It’s green. It’s a trailhead.

I close my eyes and trace it backward, back through the silence, through the surf, through the shrine I left behind. I remember the hush of pine needles beneath me. I remember the birds. I remember God, wild and feral and growing sideways.

I remember her.

And maybe that’s all I need. Not to go back. Not to stay. But to carry the forest with me in the soft part of my chest. To stop asking for permission to remember it.

I’m not out of the woods. But I brought back a map.