Where The Reflection Takes Me

It took a few seconds to realize I was utterly and completely lost. It took an hour to realize I was not alone. It took the last few moments to accept it, and only one of them to run.

The woods were crowded. Not with people, but sounds. Me, myself, them, the lake, trees, creepers, truth, solitude, vacancy, displacement. There wasn't anywhere to go to, other than farther away, but I guess my head would have preferred I go there rather than anywhere else. So I flew.

I knew I was escaping something. And I'm at the lake. Practically on the shoreline. Those things, I was sure of, but the rest was ineffable as of yet. There were drying leaves that seemed plaster-caked to the soil, and the way they lied as my pace increased gave them a shallowly dull gradient; the yellows faded into a burgundy red, which swayed back and forth from brown to beige, and finally to black where the earth was exposed. My feet were likely destroying it as they thudded deeper into the mud, scaling across gray tree trunks and a dead branch sky, which seemed like stitches being woven onto the skin of the white clouds above.

The sounds had diminished into susurration, but my wet body wasn't prepared to stop yet. The gradient was shifting like gears slowly: yellow, red, brown, tan, black. Yellow. Red. Brown. Tan. Black.

I tried exaggerating my run to save up some energy, but that just tuckered my flame quicker. With some heaves and the slug of my shoulders, I dropped near the closest tree of ash and lay awake. Hoping for an instance where the trees separate and I find something I can remember, or that I can just take that moment in and understand why I'm here. What is it I'm facing. Or better yet, avoiding.

The sounds. They dangled from tree to tree, almost like audio threads that resembled snakes clinching to the rotted branches. I only made the mistake twice to listen, and only made it the second time out of fatigue.

The first, was beckoning. Words of passionate promises, sentences that yearned my soul to slow itself just enough to where I was caught. Sirens to the pirate ships, I told myself when I heard them, but some silent portion of me wanted to accept them.

' Clear, clear, clear, ' one of them told me. Perhaps to wipe away my thoughts, the small fragments of me that were left. I'd already lost myself in the woods, and my body didn't seem all that close at times either. Sprinting through the outskirts of the lake, only the space behind my ribs felt heavy: the rest of me was there, in the tides, with the foamy rush of a mirror lake and the feel of mossy rock below my feet. I was drifting. On my very tiptoes, barely scraping a surface that I was being told to let go. Looking up at the white sky, while my cheeks sat right on that border where my eyes couldn't lower, or else they'd have to shut.

The tree was stabbing at my spine, and with it the voices seemed to be dying. They were leaving me, more than I was leaving them, and suddenly it felt as if the relief was moreover emptiness. Without the purpose of what beckoned me, I was hollow. The bark on the tree was shedding as I adjusted upwards, and as it peeled from its fungi-infested core, there it was again.

' Come to me. '

My third mistake of listening. Although it wasn't the tree, nor the bark, or even myself. It was that place I had found, and if I wasted another moment, I would lose it. Myself.

So I turned around. My thighs with strain as they flexed up, and soon my hips were rotating, and every inch of me was trying to move forward to the best of its ability.

The gradient was reversing. Time on my imaginary clock was ticking backwards, and with each tick came the next color. Black. Tan. Brown. Red. Yellow. The voices were no longer oppressing but being blown apart by the wind, which in a burst began to flood the decay, sending bough upon stick flying upwards and down again, the leaves tearing from a moist landscape and the clouds beginning to be forcibly unstitched. A tree uprooted, and behind me it thundered down into a crash where the voices cowered further. I sprinted along the bank, with the smell of salt and thick clay leading me forward, as the ground beneath me slowly got pointier, grainy and dense. The wind began to plunder all that was left of the shores, and each slam of the tide turned into an explosion of nature into itself, the voices only barely escaping each crusade.

' Come! ' They said. With the skies seeming darker than usual, the only light came from the lake ahead, the shoreline dipping beneath that water into a field that spanned forever. ' Pull her! ' They seemed to cry, and even in the midst of destruction I thought of how sad they may be. I pushed on, feet now lunging from only the sands, a mere yard from the mirror of everything I know. ' Clear the way, clear the way... ' I heard, as the panic began to shift once more into disruption, as my first leg touched the thin line between the lake and beach. Between the mutters and me. They seemed loud, but not screaming. Yearning.

And then silence.

The winds had seized. Debris still lay in the lake, scattered along the beach, even on the flaking trees and the shaded mess behind me. The lake seemed still, with the smallest of waves coming to meet my ankles, and I slowly stepped forward. No sounds. No feeling of vicissitude or even the regret of my decision: the reflection of the water was choppy, although I could sense its beauty was something I'd get to experience again. Nostalgic, where the lump in my throat was only for something I may never experience again. But I was here, calf-deep now near something I couldn't explain yet. The water didn't prick at my legs with coldness, but merely sensation. The fact that it was there, ascending and descending my body as I stared into the ripples, was enough.

I let it reach my hips. The silence was daunting, but embracing in a way. It didn't rush me. I could look inside and see the clouds, the shoreline, but there was no storm. No air cutlasses, slicing the back of trees, and beyond even that was the color. The willows; they were more vivid than my eyes could accept, and below them were lush grasses and cattails that seemed to be elegantly dancing in a silent, beautiful place I couldn't dare touch. Even in its serenity, there was a sense of comfort in the fact that it wasn't perfect. There was an uneven sense to the trees where they tilted towards an ever-radiant sun, and the sky above didn't always have a cloud to fill the opal void where they should be.

My neck had met the water. I couldn't see the beauty anymore, but my body felt it. No more sounds other than the buzz of water overlapping my ears and drowning out the normalcy of a world above.

My eyes were all that stayed above. They stared into that ashen sky, where one single bird flew in an arc along it and back into a mass of intertwining sticks.

"Hup!" I heaved a breath, before I was under. My feet sunk downwards, and my eyes slammed themselves shut as I submerged beneath, and I let myself rest there. Even against the feeling of there being nothing, I opened my eyes once more to see the sky from below: and instead, it was there.

That reflection of a world I had left but not the one I had escaped. The beauty of it, a place where the willows and creepers were similarly wet green, and the shoreline seemed less jagged where it met soil and small flowers that bloomed between the two environments. The water was rippling above, however, and my conscious was starting to fade from me. The voices were there, too.

They began to speak to me, but muffled, as if my hiding place beneath the water was keeping me safe from them.

The image shook violently, the water beginning to ripple when my last breath finally let go beneath the waves.

"Pull her up!" A voice spoke. But there were more.

"Hey, clear it up here, call 911! The hell are you doing, hurry it up!"

A mass outbreak of scattered talk and worrisome faces.

"Come on, come on..."

I felt pressure on my chest. But my eyes didn't want to open yet. They seemed comfortable in this state, ready to join that easy dark space where they didn't have to look at anything. They could rest here. My body, could rest here.

Behind them, came a blaring sound in the distance, one closer and louder than the rest. Brightness and flashes erupted across my eyelids, and with it came the stampede of footsteps and jangling car keys.

"Out the way! Everybody moves, everybody stands by." This one was urgent, deeper. A little demanding with its words.

A weird rubbing around my core, with some fabric of sorts. Maybe a shirt or towel. Then, the loudest sound I'd experienced yet.

"Clear!"

A flutter in my chest.

"Clear!"

It was cold. Like the air around me was beginning to shiver itself, trying to stick to every part of me for comfort.

"Clear!"

A cough. Like puking, I felt whatever remnants of myself I'd lost spilled out onto the dirt around me, and suddenly I was surrounded. My eyes were met with a barrage of blue uniforms and a towel wrapped around my shivering body.

With the voices came panic, loudness, questioning. But I responded with silence, my only desire looking towards that lake. The foamy shore was drifting back and forth, with the groan of it coming back and forth speaking to me.

In its reflection, I saw a gray world. The debris of sticks from what must have been a storm, some leaves swirling around below the surface in the oddest of colors, a deep end where I couldn't possibly stand, and a weird sense of longing that I couldn't shake from my wet, sore body.

I wondered where that reflection would take me.