I was walking in a forest when I saw a woman, around the ages of forty to forty five. We began to engage in a conversation when I asked her “How old are you?” She answered “Too young.” I was confused but I kept the conversation going. After a while I tried another question, “Where do you live?”
“Too close.” Her answers were so indirect. It scared me a little but I kept the conversation going. We continued to talk with one another until I lost control of myself and began to ask the question “When did you die?”
“Too early.” She said.
“Where did you die?”
“Right here.”




~ ~

I woke up in panic. I had never woken up in such horror. Sweat, tears, and hot air all covering the atmosphere of my bedroom. I tried to pull myself together. It was only a dream. I told myself. It was nothing that actually happened. You were never in a real forest and you can’t talk to dead people, so that story is ruled out of real life. I sat up in my bed, grabbed my slippers from my dog’s mouth, and started my way out of the room.
The words hold yourself together went threw my head like a knife going threw a human hand; fast, and easy. My younger brother, Kevin, was already watching television when I walked in the kitchen. “Can you hurry up?” My mother cried, pulling her eyes from the newspaper lying on the kitchen table to my face.
“I had another dream.” I answered. She must have been so thrilled to hear my new dream. When I was a child, she would tell all of her friends that I was gifted with special dreams. Now, I just have dreams like anyone else.
She took a quick ship of her coffee, “I really don’t have time to listen to that now kido. Just, tell me about it on the way to school.”
“Yup.” She always told me that. When did she really have time for me? Never.
“I need you to pick up some dinner at the Chinese store by your school before you get home this afternoon.” Once again, talking to her issue yet reading all the other issues in the world. Before she could command me any longer I was in my room pulling up a fresh pair of blue jeans in the clean clothes basket on the floor. I searched in my drawer for a white t-shirt that would rap around my body. Out the door I went.
“Hey!” She yelled across the grass. I turned around looking at another issue I had, the grass. It needed to be cut. I watched the tall grass while I waited for her response. “I thought you where driving with me.”
Nope.” I continued to walk.
“You think those one word answers are going to get you places!?!”
“Yup, it’s working for you.”



~ ~
School was never fun. I never went much because it wasn’t that fun. I spent a lot of my time walking in the California sun; thinking most of the time, singing a song in my head, and thinking about dreams. Today I tried not to think about the dream; it was as if it actually happened, as if I was teleported from my room to the forest.
After awhile I gave up on what I wanted to do and just did what had to be done. I walked where ever my soul took me whenever a dream bothered me. Today it was the forest. It seemed to be colder in the forest. I couldn’t hear an animal or see a track of one that recently passed. I walked for a kilometer or so, then I found myself a tree and passed out.


~ ~
“I remember the days when we were okay. You would tell all of your friends about how smart I was; about the dreams I would have. It didn’t matter what they had to say, you always believed in me.” The women softly touched my face, pulling her face towards mine, kissing my cheek with such grace.
“You shouldn’t have to think back to those days. It still happens. I’m right here.” She answered drawing herself back to the forest floor, posing her body as a corpse.


~ ~
I found myself back in the same atmosphere. I tried walking it out, that’s when I saw her. “What do you want?”
“I knew I would find you here.” She answered with a smile. Not of joy but of relief.
“Don’t you have a book to write, a novel to edit?”
“Yes, but there is something more important, that I need to take care of.”
“Like what?” I pushed my foot around in the dirt trying not to make eye contact.
“Like you.” Like me? When was the last time she was thinking about me as something important? Never. “Sometimes people forget what is most important in life, like how I forgot about you. I’m so sorry.” She started to cry.
“You’re not. Leave me alone.” She ran after me, pleading for her first born, first forgotten, to forgive her.
“No. I am deeply sorry for how I have forgotten about you. If you can only-“
There are moments in life when you need to do what your heart tells you and not what your brain does. For example, people become oboist because they listen when their brain says I’m hungry, and not when their stomach (Heart) tells them that they are.
You always want to hear that one person tell you how sorry they are. You always went to tell them that you forgive them. You always went to rap yourself around them and tell them, its okay.
As the wind blew the tree fell, as the tree fell so did my mother and I. Reaching for her hand, I answered her one last time, “It’s okay.”