The Forest
The afternoon sun was projecting itself through the classroom windows at an angle only seen in late October. Nico watched as the shaft of light migrated across the tile floor. He had been watching it for some time without realizing—the way you sometimes find yourself staring at a thing before noticing the staring began long before the noticing.
Mr. Mikaz was going off on a tangent about symbiotic relationships. The words reached Nico the way sound travels across water, arriving softer and muted. The girls in front of him were chatting away, laughing occasionally. Chairs creaking, pens clicking—these sounds registered inside Nico’s mind, until they didn’t.
The shaft of light inched forward, projecting itself as a flat and indifferent parallelogram on the floor. As it reached the teacher’s desk, a scuff mark appeared that had always been there, just not in Nico’s mind. He thought about how the mark, though physically present every ordinary afternoon, only registered when the light decided to.
He thought about time. Not in any grand way, just the fact of it. How it moved like the light, slowly without announcement, and how you never felt it going until something incidental caught it mid-motion. He was seventeen, but not for long. The feeling of time passing unnoticed was just a fleeting thought under the weight of October light, pressing gently on his forehead.
Mr. Mikaz’s words drifted further away as Nico sailed deeper into thought.
The light hit the teacher’s table, splitting around it. Nico followed the split with his eyes while his mind wandered to a field he had never been to, a morning he had never woken up in. Something about the autumnal air outside his window made his thoughts feel less like imagination and more like memory, as though the field were waiting for him. He drifted.
His eyelids did not close. Or if they did, he did not feel them close.
He opened his eyes.
In front of him was a forest. Unannounced, it was simply there, present before his very eyes. It did not materialize out of mist but pre-existed like a room you walk into, indifferent to your arrival.
Dark pines stood before him, tall and close, their trunks the color of old iron. Between them the light fell in columns that did not quite reach the ground. The air smelled of soil and resin and something underneath both—something older, something he did not know. It was cold, not from temperature but from stillness. Nico stood at the edge of it.
His attire was the same as in class—a tucked white shirt with wide-legged navy pants held together by a belt. He stood there equipped with nothing but confusion and awe. Nothing made sense, but he accepted the forest, accepted the internal logic of this place without negotiating. He gazed at it. It did not reciprocate.
Then he saw a figure, perhaps thirty meters ahead, at a point where trees thickened and the path—a narrow compression of earth darker than the earth around it—bent and disappeared behind them. The figure was light. Not lit, not glowing in any dramatic sense. Light in the way that a blank canvas would appear against a colorful background. It occupied space differently than things ordinarily did. Its edges were soft. Its face, if it had one, was turned away enough that Nico could not have described it.
Nico knew it the way you recognize something from a dream you cannot recall—not the details but the feelings surrounding them, the emotional residue of a vanished thing manifested in the figure.
He blinked. It moved.
The closer he got, the further it retreated into the trees, unhurried, as though walking somewhere it had always intended to go. There was nothing beckoning in it—no outstretched hand, no backward glance. It just moved seamlessly through space, leaving behind a faint and wordless pull.
Nico followed. He did not decide to. The step preceded the decision the way his staring at the light preceded the noticing. His foot found the dark earth of the path and the earth received it and he was walking. The trees closed around the figure ahead, and he followed.
Later—though in this space there was no clear sense of later—he would try to
account for why. He found nothing satisfactory. Not curiosity, not courage, not even the human compulsion toward beauty. His drive was something simpler and less admirable. It resembled inevitability, as though he was destined to walk this path and was only now arriving at it.
The forest received him.
The path was solid underfoot. The pines barely stood back on either side. The light falling between the trees was the last of it—thin and lateral, the rest above the canopy. Ahead, the figure moved through the dark like something remembered.
He followed.
