Forest outside the box

The city blocks me out. Placing me in this box, I hate it. There is no escape. Nowhere for me to go. There needs to be somewhere else where I don’t have to think about what everyone sees in me. Somewhere I don’t have to be defined by a structure that I didn’t get to decide. What will that change in me? Would it lead me to be different, or would I just end up being the same but without all the stress of doing so? The city lights block out the stars in the sky, these big buildings stop me from seeing the moon. I have no idea whether the clouds in the sky are smoke or clouds. The faces I see every day have turned to stone, and so have I.

I know there is a forest nearby, on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of the hills. Maybe that is the cure I could have for this stone syndrome I am in. So then, I begin running, faster than I ever have before. Slowly the pieces of stone on my face break off, and my eyes open to the world around me. As I reach the forest my feet have turned purple and my shoes are nowhere to be seen. Yet, I don’t feel any pain. My face is filled with a beard I could never grow before. My eyes are open to a degree they never have been to before. The irritations in my ears that filled my head are fading quickly and finally, I touch true soil. Right there, the forest stops me from entering. The bushes have formed a barrier in Infront of me. Not to protect me from what is inside, yet to protect what is inside from me.

I push through, as any human breaking out of stone would. I saw people trying to take this run along with me yet not every one of them crossed that bush. Maybe some of them liked being stones. That would be believable since it was so restricting that it almost made any effort impossible. As I enter this forest the trees turn their branches toward me, and the blades of grass stand up straight in a way that everything seems on high alert. The creatures begin staring at me in a way that doesn’t even seem real. It felt as if everything outside me was hypnotised by my presence. Just then the ground beneath my feet disappeared. I fell through the soil and the land. Every piece of stone on my body returned to the earth. I kept falling until I came right back out of the hole I fell into.

There it was. The forest and I were now one. No boxes held me down, nowhere to escape from or to. Nothing that could look at me differently. No structure that I didn’t decide on myself. The stars shined bright with the moon. Yet now what was my support for survival? At least the box forced me to be alive, it seems as if the forest doesn’t care. That’s what makes it so great, isn’t it?