I Slept in That Forest Once — And Died to Live Again

I slept in that forest once.

Just for a night. Just to escape.

That’s what I told myself when I packed nothing but a notebook, a flask of tea, and the ache in my chest. The world had grown too loud, too cruel, and I needed to disappear.

I didn’t know then that the forest had its own memory. That it keeps those who come to forget.

They call it the Greenwood Verge.

A stretch of ancient pines that hum when the wind presses through, as if whispering secrets to one another. No trails. No markers. Birds don’t sing there.

I passed the old wooden arch at dusk—half-swallowed by ivy—and stepped beneath the canopy. The air changed. Quieter. Heavier. My phone lost signal within moments, and strangely, that brought relief.

I wasn’t trying to be found.

By midnight, the forest was wrapped in ink. I lay beneath a tree older than my grief, notebook clutched to my chest, and waited to feel something. Anything.

My mind wandered: to my father’s last words, my own failures, the dreams I buried to become someone I no longer recognized.

I remember whispering aloud:

“I wish I could just start over.”

And the forest answered.

I awoke not to birdsong, but silence.

The kind of silence that doesn’t belong to nature—but to something watching.

I sat up. The trees looked the same, but they were not the same.

Their bark now glistened as if weeping. Their branches curved toward me like curious fingers. And there were footprints in the moss—not mine.

Bare, human, wandering in circles.

I wandered, too.

For hours. Or days. Time seemed soft here, like clay. The sun never rose; the twilight never left.

And then I saw her.

A girl, no older than ten, sitting in the crook of a bent tree, humming a lullaby I hadn’t heard since childhood. My mother used to sing it before she forgot my name.

She looked up and smiled.

“You came,” she said.

“I… don’t know who you are.”

She shrugged. “You will. Everyone does. Eventually.”

She led me to a clearing of mirrors.

Not made of glass—no, they were pools. Dozens of still, round puddles, each no larger than a dinner plate, and each reflecting something different.

Not the sky.

Not the trees.

But me.

In each reflection, I saw a different life. A different version of myself.

In one, I wore a stethoscope. In another, I held paint-stained hands. One showed me holding a daughter I never had. Another… was just me. Alone, smiling.

Happy.

I knelt by one and touched the water.

It rippled—and I felt it in my chest. Like grief releasing a breath.

“What is this?” I whispered.

“Choices,” she said. “Versions. You can take one. Trade your pain for it. Start again.”

I wanted to. God, I wanted to.

But I remembered the words I had once written in the margins of a therapy journal:

“I don’t want to forget who I was just to become someone else.”

Even if who I was… hurt.

I pulled back from the mirror. The girl nodded.

“Not everyone chooses,” she said. “But all who come here die. That’s the rule.”

“Die?”

“In some way,” she said. “But it’s not so bad. It just means you leave a part of you behind.”

That night, I slept in the clearing.

The forest curled around me like a mother’s arm, and I dreamed.

Dreamed of my childhood home. The dog we buried under the lilac bush. The night I almost told someone I loved them but chose silence instead. Dreamed of every goodbye I had pretended didn’t hurt.

And when I woke…

…I wasn’t the same.

I walked back the way I’d come. Somehow, I knew the forest had shifted to let me out. The trees hummed differently now, like approval. The ivy arch greeted me with dew-wet leaves, and the moment I stepped out, the signal returned.

So did the weight of the world—but it sat lighter on my shoulders.

I returned to my apartment, dusty and still. Nothing had changed.

Except me.

I called my sister for the first time in years. I opened the notebook I brought to the forest and wrote—not to forget, but to remember differently.

Grief no longer pressed like a stone. It moved more like a shadow: still there, but no longer in the way of light.

Now, when people ask where I went during that week I vanished, I just say: “I took a walk.”

And if they push, I offer a smile and a single truth:

“I slept in that forest once.

And I died.

To live again.”