4.28

[I got home today, rode a bike, took a shower, and fell asleep.
I just stopped doing. This is not to say I was done for the day; that's far from the truth. I could have done a million things and should have done a million more. I didn't read a book, wash the dog, or write a play like I wanted. I didn't grade papers or prep for tomorrow like I needed. Instead, I just fell asleep. Sometimes, I feel like this is my entire existence right now. Survive. It's my mantra.]

I crouched in the semi-dark and let my eyes unfocus. I attuned my vision to any motion in my peripherals and waited for even the softest flicker of light or dark, a tell-tale whisper of light that would reveal prey or predator.  The trees over me rustled softly against each other, but no breeze cut through the dense canopy to touch me, and I began to sweat. I still didn't move, even though salt water ran down into my eyes and collected on my nose. The density of the air trapped me like a slowly solidifying mud pack, gently easing my muscles into a hardened set fixture. I began to feel oppressed by the mounting weight of air setting on me. My mind curled around a new idea and it became distressing to breathe, my diaphragm now moving consciously, mind-controlled, a burden instead of a boon. I felt the air rush in and out like time-lapse molasses, a reminder of the stillness of earth and air that led to me sitting, attenuated to the microscopic motions of hairs on my arms and of leaves in the woods, my body an extending reality, the woods breathing with me, damp and exhausting. The trees were my skeleton, the water my blood, the whole world around me just as I was: still, pregnant with expectant strife, alert.
The reverberant echo of the gunshot nearly killed me. From all around, birds exploded from hiding places I didn't think possible just moments before. Every leaf hid a feather, every crook held a beak, and every bird burst into flight in the self-same moment, a hundred thousand wings beating the air downward and making an enormous rushing sound to match the now-thunderous burst of blood in my ears, the still forest leaves beaten down and trembling in the crush of noise and air. Every bird gave call in its voice, and I screamed with them, the fright and wonder of the echoing shot just as keen to each avian escapist as to the human trapped on the ground. The forest became unbearably heavy as the birds took off, the bone-bending sound of them pressing me to the ground and crushing out the air in my lungs, and just as suddenly: the atmosphere lightened as the forest did, the mass of a thousand thousand birds suddenly lifted from it, the weight of terror lifted from me.
I looked up, and the birds blocked out the sun itself, and I felt the darkness interior to match. I had lost the moment and still had my life.