She ran anxiously through a forest of overgrown trees that hadn’t been touched by another human in years. Thick foliage ripped her feet raw as they bled and painted lush verdant carpeting a morbid maroon. In the thick of thicket, surrounded by oak and pine, a lone stop sign stood, screaming its one purpose, “STOP!”
But she just kept running. She wasn’t sure where. The trees blocked the view of anything beyond and her feet were scraped to the bone, but she ran anyway in circles and squares and circles again.
There was, she later observed, a clear, paved path out of the forest, down the road, to town, where people laughed and played and drank and took comfortable shelter at night and in the storms. But, for whatever reason, she couldn’t see it. She refused to see it. Plenty watched this woman running in circles, her feet tattered, her clothes torn, her body aching, and questioned why she didn’t just step on to the path and head back into town.
She didn’t see it. The more she ran, the further blind she became to anything but trees and that stop sign, coming into view time and again, cutting through leaves, pinecones, and bits of broken and unbroken branches sprawling to the sky. She just kept running because that is all she knew how to do. And she hoped, without hope, that someday deep in that forest, there, in the prickled green, would be another pair of feet, freshly wounded, another set of eyes, seeking an exit but incapable of finding the obvious path out, and another pair of fingertips, reaching recklessly towards the branch-cut sky.
Instead she remained there, alone, revisiting the stop sign every few days and pondering its significance. “Why stop if there is no one else here,” she thought. “Why stop if I don’t even know the first thing about how to start.” She looked down at her battered feet, layered with old and fresh dirt and dried blood, and continued on, in circles, through the forest, running for the sake of staying in constant motion, hearing the laughter erupt from those in town, somewhere, nearby, and suffering from self-sourced infliction.
The forest isn’t real, the villagers knew. It was just a stop sign and a crazy woman circling it. She hadn’t any wounds on her feet, only deep in her heart, long ago pierced by something far more sinister than fabricated forest; her throbbing vessel, beating alive at her core, punctured prematurely, left open and raw, with a wanting wound, festering from infinite intervals of intellectual isolation.
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