Work Text:
Wakefulness comes as it always does: slow and reluctant, like pulling free of mud at the bottom of a river. Your eyes open to face the branches arching above, but what comes into focus first is what lies beneath you. Moss, bits of grass, a few stray curling ferns. Then earth. Dark, damp, composed of layers of decomposing detritus, leaves cast off by the very trees sheltering you. Shifting through the soil, you find a network of roots, stretching down, down, down, into the ground. You trace your way up them, out of the soil and along to their trunks, bringing the treetops into focus in a way your eyes won’t. But it’s difficult, keeping your attention so far up. You let it fall back down again, into the earth below.
It’s lively there, if you know how to look properly. Lively in a way that doesn’t tire you, unlike so many things. Insects, worms, most tiny specs you can barely make out, making their way through that damp darkness like countless stars swirling through void, going about their business of making the old new. There are larger creatures too, easier to find, bright lights in this relative dark. You feel the rap-tap-tap of a mouse’s heartbeat —frantic, small, fragile, but cradled protectively in the earth. Cradled as you are now, with the soil pressed in comfortably around you, embracing you as you’re weighted down.
You could sink into it. Let it pull you down, let the bugs and the worms take you apart, take your exhaustion away and give you new life. It’d be easy. It’d be so easy.
But you don’t. You’ve spent too long lying here, already. You peel yourself off the ground, to your feet. Your heart breaks, just a bit, as it always does. But it’s been a long while since you stopped wondering if the grief ever becomes less heavy.
With a shake, you cast off the dirt from your shoulders. Still, the scent lingers, in a way that no amount of cleaning ever seems to fully remove.
The first step is always the hardest. But you manage it. And then the next. And the next. And the next. It’s easier, once you get the momentum going. You remind yourself that one day you’ll be able to stop.