The Curious Man: What is this Forest?

The first thing he noticed was nothing. It was dark, darkness everywhere. He looked around but there was nothing, nothing to see in this desolate darkness as far as the eye could reach. This was the abyss. Yet, amidst this emptiness, an unsettling feeling crept over him. He thought he was alone but he wasn’t. He could feel a presence. It felt like a glare coming from abyss.

“The abyss is staring... at me,” he murmured.

The sound startled him. It felt really strange to him when words—his words came to him. The realization took over: he was somehow alive in this complete darkness. He was alive and could see but that was all he could do and what to see in this void, except nothing. Just an endless void of darkness. But he did felt the abyss. Not as absence, but living, staring, deeper, like it was breathing.

The darkness had seeped into him, to the point he was utterly empty, yet he wasn’t truly empty. He had curiosity about himself, he was alive, wasn’t he? At some point he felt another sensation, it came from deep inside him, but he couldn’t tell what it was? Or what he actually felt? A whisper urging him to question.

“Hello?” he called out.

His echo disappeared into the void, at the same time a soft and frail voice crossed his senseless ears, he could hear. He no longer thought of himself as a voice, floating in darkness. No, he was something more. He was certain. Someone.

But who?

His memories were blank, no past he remembered, no fragments of a life lived, no emotions to bind him; he was just empty. This was only now, this curiosity struck him: Who am I? The question echoed in the void. How could he not know? How something so important just didn’t exist? Curiosity was the only thing he had left, while he was busy with his curiosity.

The abyss answered, void stirred. Then came the wind.

At first, it was just a whisper, a cold sensation brushing against his skin, he didn’t noticed it until the whisper grew, carrying with it a howl. A chilling, piercing sound, like a scream of a beast.

The curious man tried to cover his ears as it grew louder and louder. Fear, a feeling unknown to him took over. It was really cold, overwhelmingly loud, and violent. He could feel the pressure of the wind pressing against him. Pushing him back.

Is it going to end me? He thought, consumed by the fear of an unknown beast. Eyes tightly shut, arms covering his head, trembling, it was inescapable. He was powerless. It was suffocation. He didn’t have what it takes to fight back. He disliked being in situations where he was pressured or stressed, but this was beyond that. It was overwhelming him. Instinctively, he was slowly curling into a defensive position, his helpless body was trying to protect him. But the wind kept getting worse. The curious man was cornered by the screams of the beast that it was almost as if tearing him apart.

When a helpless small animal is cornered by a big scary predator, it makes a scream that is neither a cry nor a fight but a pure sound originated from agony, fear and desperation all rolled into one, a scream instinctively erupting from its very core, it is not something it has done before but under such situation it happens naturally. Because it wants to live.

“Stop!” He screamed helplessly, his voice cracking.

But it didn’t stopped. The wind devoured his cries. He was nothing but a mere conscience in the face of a fierce darkness that swallowed him whole. It was no longer a violent wind but a storm that tumbled him, played with him like a beast toying with its food. He was screaming but his sound was lost in this storm not even he could hear himself anymore.

At this point, he just gave up. The storm shattered him, vanished his voice. It tore him. He floated there with no strength, no emotions, cold and motionless as the darkness started to consume him. Lost. Drifting away into the darkness. His thoughts were slowly fading away as he was getting smaller and smaller.

But before he was vanished completely, he grew a profound certainty. Something or someone was watching him. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. It had been there all along, silently watching him in his misery. Without closing in or intervening. It was beyond darkness, somewhere he could not reach. Desperate, he reached out, he sought it with all that was left of him. Yet, it didn’t intervene and stayed there, watching him silently. Maybe it wasn’t a savior.

“Did the wind stop? Did it get quiet...?”

The curious man’s thoughts fainted, losing consciousness. He felt nothing now, his lifeless eyes shutting close. And then there was nothing.

Cold and hollow. Silence was formed in abyss once again. His conscience disappeared.

BANG!

Thump-thump… Thump-thump…

His heartbeat was the first sound he became aware of. Rapid, but steady. With it came a sharp whistle that filled his ears. It was painfully bright, squinting his eyes as he tried to open them. With each blink and rub, the world was sharpening and filling with colors.

Green. Brown. Rays of light filtering through branches. Butterflies fluttering around him, slightly out of focus. He realized he was lying on a soft carpet of grass, moss along with fallen leaves. It was a forest.

“Where… where am I?” he murmured.

He pushed himself up, head swaying, vision still blurry, ears still ringing. Forest surrounded him in every direction, trees stretching, lush and vibrant forest, yet silent. The butterflies. They were gone without a trace.

“Was I… seeing things?” he whispered.

His gaze fell on a windflower that was just lying on the ground. He picked it up, pale and delicate petals, it was trembling from the gentle breeze that was flowing through the trees.

“Beautiful” the word slipping from his lips without any emotion. Yet in a blink, the flower was not a flower just a twig, brittle and lifeless twig. He stared, without blinking, as if nothing had changed. Or perhaps there was never a flower.

An endless forest stretched around him, towering old trees covered in moss, fallen branches, and vines weaving through the air like heavy wires. It was lush, wild, overgrown with grass and bushes. Beams of sunlight pierced through the branches, leaves falling from the gentle breeze. It was almost beautiful, abandoned forest. It was a place he had never seen yet it felt distant. Like a painting, a glimpse maybe, he had a glimpse of it somewhere but nothing came to his mind. Had he lived here in this forest? How did he get here in the first place? He was more stranger to himself than this place itself.

The curious man began walking, wandering and wondering through the forest silently. Maybe he was searching for something, something out of place or maybe something familiar but there was nothing, no paths, no ruins, no marks, not even a sound.

What unsettled him the most, was the quietness. No birds chirping. No creature crawling. It was a truly strange place after all. You don’t simply find a forest utterly silent, there is always sound, liveliness and noise in a forest but it was just quiet, strangely. A forest unnaturally still, with no life and a silence so calm that it began to crowd his mind, such a place would do that to anyone.

A faint crack broke the silence.

When a piece of bark peeled away from a tree to his left, tumbling down with a small thud on the forest floor. The Curious man stopped for a moment, staring at it, motionless, still and frozen for a moment as if the time itself had paused.

The tree loomed before him. Old, weathered, and defiant. Its barks split in long pieces, deep cracks had formed across its trunk, wounds that never fully healed, yet it remained standing, not strongly, but stood still. Vines surrounding it tightly, like desperately holding it from falling. Covered in moss at its base, preventing the decay from the roots. They were disguising the scars and damages in a beautiful green but it was all still visible, the damage it took from just existing. He stared at the tree and it felt as if the tree was staring back. The air between them was vibrating and somehow warm.

The tree had a story unlike him, which didn’t needed words to tell. It had known worst, it survived storms, maybe droughts and floods as well. Time and nature had tried to break it down but left it fractured, yet it stood tall, still holding itself together in silence, unfallen.

A faint tremor passed through the ground, deep underground. The curious man was ignorantly staring at the tree, maybe he didn’t noticed it at all when branches and leaves shivered or maybe he was too focused on the tree.

His hand trembled as he touched scars on the tree. It wasn’t fear, recognition, realization, sympathy, all sorts of feelings could be felt at this moment but this was much deeper, familiarity. The wounds it had taken, scars it had formed, none of it belonged to him, yet he felt it as if he was brushing his fingers against his own reflection in a mirror. Curiosity struck him hard. When he realized the tree was looming over him, it wasn’t a being that could speak like him. Yet it had told him everything about itself which he couldn’t. It was mocking him. He couldn’t communicate, he couldn’t tell his story, he didn’t know if he had such scars and neither was he sure if he had a story.

Confusion and Curiosity.

“who am I?”

For the first time he felt so lonely in this place, so lost. He stepped away from the tree immediately and walked in opposite direction to get away from this mockery. Confused and unfocusedly glaring down, curious and straining his mind to get the answer but there was nothing. He couldn’t remember anything, there was no name he could recall, no feelings he could feel, no attachments to anything. He was completely lost. A hollow man, looking for answers that he didn’t have, curiosity about his being kept on growing, how such a person could exist that was completely hollow inside. But that didn’t stop him, he really wanted to know, he was losing his sanity and the silence of the forest, grew quieter with each step he took, closing in on him. He was starting lose it all. It was as if the forest was following him or perhaps he was circling in the same place without realizing it but he wasn’t sure about what was actually happening around him because he was growing more and more curious.

“why can’t I remember!”

“why is this place so silent!”

“where am I going, is there any end to this forest!”

He grew desperate and impatient, as more and more questions were floating over him.

“What is this Forest?”

This was the moment, the moment he asked this question due to his urging curiosity something stirred in him, his insides started to move in a spiral, he could feel his organs twisting, muscles tightening, breathing heavily, he could feel a hole emerging in his gut, with it came an emotion that he had never felt before.

It was Terror. He had been consumed by it already.

To be continued...