Risk and you shall receive

Truly, I wasn’t hungry. But I decided to sniff about the terrain again that night for any small rodents that might be out tonight,
A small ounce of reassurance that my thoughts would not be driven by my stomach, inadequate thought I knew it to be.
As I padded through the shadows of the trees, a memory of last night lit up my train of thought. I remembered spending time talking to myself through the glass surface of a waters edge. I saw the way my features had been twisted in fierce despair. I felt again the surprise and worry that ached through my chest. It was the thoughts of what happened to Mom that had my insides all contorted around in a knot. Suddenly I paused my movements forward, blinking furiously but then opting to keep my eyes shut as a wave of sharp pitched ringing entered my ears. A paw lifted up close to my chest and I leaned my weight back, waiting a few moments for it to disappear.

‘Do what you must… to resist.’
Blood orange eyes opened slowly.
“Do…what? I don’t understand.”
Cracking came echoed in my head, like something being broken apart. Then the faint sound of laughter.

I waited. There was no response after that. My paw came back down onto the earth and I blinked again, looking around me in case someone was watching. The ringing slowly dissipated after that, leaving me alone with the subtle chirping of the crickets once again. I had been wondering if me being here was doing the right thing, escaping away from my responsibilities. This was the first time in my life that I’ve felt such an internal war that it felt like I was being ripped in two. What made it worse was not having anyone to ask what was happening to me…

I slowly kept going in no clear direction, but now I was barely jogging through the darkness. My head hung low as I went onward, my expression more than likely tightened in response to how I felt. The trees rustled above me, talking. They swayed back and forth with their growing plumages, even sending a few of their leaves to the ground. One landed on my nose, eliciting a quick snort and shake. That’s when I heard the cracking.

Crr-crrrrrraaaaaacck.
My head lifted towards the sky. An inhale hitched in my throat as I heard and saw a large branch crashing through smaller ones as it came cascading down towards the earth.
“Woah!” The sound of my bark was suffocated by the tumbling of the branch as I darted to my side, ending up sandwiched between a cluster of younger trees. My body moved swiftly, pushing myself up against the smaller trunks so much so that I ended up lifting myself onto my hind legs. My front paws found a steady spot above my head on a couple of the young trees while I watched dumbfounded as the large old branch get stuck leaning up against a tree a few meters across from me. I eyed it up and down. It looked thick enough to support a tree on its own and long enough to have three of me laid across it.

The burning in my chest was only relieved when I decided to take in a large breath of air. Cool and motionless as the trees I was standing on my hind legs against, I stared at the trunk waiting for it to come to lay fully on its side on the ground. Quietly, it stayed though. Shifting only a few times before settling into its new location, for now. It was a few moments before I lowered myself back onto the ground and stared up into the trees. Almost waiting for something else to try to bury me into the dirt. Nothing but a few stray twigs and leaves came, settling like dust after an explosion. It happened so quickly that I was tentative to move right after.

It was embarrassing how my world suddenly seemed to be moving all at once, and then not at all. All in one instant too. Ruby eyes came back down and I lowered my paws back down, landing on the earth with a thud. The ringing came just half a second before the reality. I groaned out loud, closing my eyes again and bearing through the pain echoing through my head. No. I wasn’t hit… but at this point, I would take the physical pain of something, anything, than what my mind was choosing to do to me.
Well. You know what they say… The universe always acted on a ‘Ask and you shall receive’ sort of bias with me. Only it was never what I wanted. And never in the way I wanted it.

Another small crack echoed around me and I opened my eyes with just enough time to see the last notch of that branch falling into the cluster of smaller trees – into the spot where I stood. On came the crack against my head before I felt the side of my body hit the earth. Then darkness swallowed my vision, giving me the reprieve that at last I had been craving.