when you're dreaming with a {broken} heart //zoe

(If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise.)

I don't ever intend to stumble upon people in the woods. It is such a rare occurrence that even the idea of finding another human being here - with time - slips from my mind. The only time I ever meet other creatures of fear in the forests is in my nightmares, slipping through the shadows of my subconscious until I'm frightened into reality. The woods in which I'm allowed in seem so dense sometimes, so vast and open, that for a few minutes you forget other people exist outside of your own little wooden world. Like you've been plucked from reality and places gently into your dreams.

Although this time I know that I'm awake, because my lungs are filled with morning air that scratches against the back of my throat and sizzles in my nose. When you spend nights battling off dreams and fighting to get out of them, you quickly learn how to differentiate reality from the conscious mind. This morning my mind is not focused on where I'm going or who I'm running from - it's floating down its own river of thought. About my hair, and whether or not I brushed it this morning, and how Gran gets fussy over it when I don't. Little things, specific things, things that remind me that I am grounded to the earth below my chilling bare feet, dewdrops between my toes and moss tickling the skin of my soles.

(If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise.)

There's always fear in me, though. Lingering there. In creaks of bones, in the tingles against my skin, in the breeze that whispers across the tips of my toes and ruffles the fabrics of the plain white dress and red coat I don. Always there, at the back of your mind, reminding you that you're never safe. Not really. Clinging to me, it hovers in the corner of my eye and behind trees, unseen - almost non-existent. Trying to trick me. But I'm smarter than that. I can hide, for now, in the present, in the morning when people wake up from their dreams and escape them, when dreams are most weak and fade away with their last desperate breaths. People may call me naive, and perhaps I am, but I see the good in people straight away only because I've spent my life searching for evil that it becomes apparent when it's not in somebody's eyes or in their cries above my head.

And there's no evil here. Only me, and somebody else who's very, very sad.

(If you go down to the woods today, you'd better not go alone.)

He sits in a tree above my head, all alone. The stranger takes me by surprise, the smile upon my face faltering. Looking up from the bottom of the world, I see him, clasping onto a branch for dear life. Suddenly I am transported 10 years backwards to a little girl trembling in the sky, stuck up a tree and petrified of getting back down again. And in just as quick a time as it takes for me to revisit that moment in my past I am gripping wooden steps and climbing higher and higher, an instinct in me thirsting to help.

"Just... hold on!" I call, struggling a little against the trunk of the tree. It seems like years since I've done this - climb so high that my insides start to churn and my limbs feel like lead. A little voice in the back of my mind nags at the fact that I probably won't be able to get down again, but right now my main concern is the kid at the top of the tree. With great amounts of struggle and a scratch or two across my arms, I eventually reach him. "Hey! It's ok! I can help you down-"

I've seen people cry like that before. I've also seen people cry when they can't get down from a tree again, and they are most certainly not the same thing. I've never told my Gran that when I was really small and my vague memories of my mother and her death blur around the edges and merge into a whole, I'd hear her weep into her pillow at night for the loss of a daughter she loved more than she ever knew. It's a cry for loss, of mourning, something you hear on Reaping Days and again when you see that familiar face from your home District that graced the stage fall down for the last time.

So I pause for a moment, letting him register my presence, and hold out a clean handkerchief emerged from my coat pocket. "Here," I coax, with all the gentleness in my voice I could muster. "Take it."

And I stay. Because I too know that a little girl once climbed to the stars and found refuge in a tree when there seemed to be no more hope, crying out to the world for help. They all just thought she was scared of heights and falling - and what kid from District Seven wouldn't be? Every month, the same story. There's always one Father who doesn't come back home, always one kid who gets taken aside from Capitol History lessons to hear their parent's fate. But the minute their name is called aloud they already know what's coming. Nobody stopped to think otherwise. For once, they all were the naive ones.

Because the little girl ten years ago wasn't terrified of coming down from the tree.

She was terrified of what was waiting for her below.

(It's lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.)

i'm up in the woods
i'm down on my time
i'm building a sill
to slow down
the time