The Forest

A Creative Writing Piece

I went to bed early that night. It had been a long, stressful day.
We’d had a fight; she told me that I had never been worthy of her. That she wished she’d never started dating me.
I’d failed my second exam for the semester. I had stayed up all night the previous day studying and cramming my brain with useless information about equations that wouldn’t solve anything I would ever use.
My parents had called me and asked me how I was doing; I told them everything that had gone on that day. They told me I needed to keep that girl because I’d never get married without her. They told me I needed to try harder and commit myself to my studies more.
I was tired.
I was annoyed.
I was done.
These were the nights that I just wanted to crawl into bed and never get out. The kind of nights where I didn’t ever want to have to face real life again.
I was so stressed out that my brain just completely shut down. No circling of thoughts through my head, no crazy to-do list that kept me up tossing and turning. Silence. Darkness. Sleep.
I was walking through a forest. Complete blackness everywhere. I could barely see my hands in front of me. The only way I knew I was in a forest was because of the dirt caked on my feet and the rustle of the leaves followed by the branches that whacked me in the face as I aimlessly scrambled around, searching for some sort of light or path that I could travel onto.
Why wasn’t I wearing shoes? How did I end up here?
I could tell I’d been here for a while.
The only light I had was the faint light of the moon, which was full but was surrounded by a haze of clouds.
That’s when I heard it.
It started with one howl, then followed by another, and another, until it was a chorus, a deafening chorus of wolves wailing at the moon. I stepped on a branch, and it snapped in half beneath my foot.
The wails turned into growls. Then pounding footsteps as the whole pack began to chase after me.
I sprinted straight, the only way I knew how to go. My feet pounded the ground deeper and deeper into the soil, I didn’t know if I could ever stop. The wolves could sense my every move. They were unshakable.
I could feel the heat of their breath on my ankles, I could sense the endless amounts of them as they tried to nip at me and get me to fall, but I was relentless.
I’m barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone run a mile. But something had taken over, I was unstoppable.
There was the faint flash of a light, and I got a glimpse of a tree up ahead that I would definitely be able to climb.
Not even thinking twice about where the light came from, I mustered all my strength and pulled myself up into the tree. The wolves howling and biting at me, trying to take me down. But I was too high now for them to reach me.
I was safe.
One by one the wolves gave in and walked away.
Cowering all the way home.
I woke up with a new sense of strength, a new sense of pride. Ready to face the day.