You’ve caught glimpses of it, over the years. Little flashes of light spilling through cracks in broken concrete. Little slivers of starlight seen through breaks in the thick canopy of leaves above you, stretching out across thousands of years, trying just to reach you.
You dug your fingers into the concrete cracks, trying to widen them, to let the light know you saw it, and you wanted it, and you would welcome it if only it could find a wider ingress. But no matter how hard you dug, until your nails broke and the skin scraped off, you never made a larger opening. Instead the crack sealed itself with your blood and the bits of yourself you broke off as if in offering, as if anything you gave could ever be enough. As if anything of you could ever be worthy.
And the starlight blinking down, illuminating scant slices of ground on the forest floor never shined bright enough to make you any less lost. You’re still wandering there, in that clutch of darkness, and the press of trees that once felt comforting has now become too comforting to ever leave. They are your only companions, whisper these tall, otherwise silent sentinels whose branches block the starlight.
You try to climb their boughs, certain that if you scramble high enough, you will break free into the sky above and, seeing the starlight unfiltered, the world laid bare in your vision, you will finally find it—the way out. You will see it and you will hold it in your heart as a north star as you slide back to the damp forest floor, thick with seasons of detritus and decomposition.
You will follow that north star, as you followed every other hint people gave you, so many pieces of advice over the years. You listened in the beginning when they pointed in a direction and said there—that is the way out. Keep walking—walk fast and do not tire, do not waver, as the heroes do not, and you too will get out.
When the wolves impeded your path, you then listened as the others said to be deserving and worthwhile, and the wolves would let you pass. You tried, when they told you to find that part of you that was unique and special and bright and to carve it from your body. To slice it into tiny pieces so it would last, and offer it to the predators, and if you found the right part of yourself, if you were deserving, it would hold them at bay.
But the wolves only grew a taste for your flesh and you found yourself cutting up smaller and smaller pieces, trying to make a dwindling resource last as the canopy grew thicker-knit above you and the starlight dimmed, and the wolves began to howl. And when you ran out of things to offer them and collapsed on the rot of the forest floor they flanked you, nipping at delicate skin, drawing blood and taking that as their due.
But when you cried until the sobs nearly broke your body, until the tears dried and the only thing left was a spent scraped-out emptiness, the wolves forgot you. Because their nips no longer provoked a reaction, and there was no blood within you left to draw, and thus used-up you were no longer interesting enough to notice. You were unsure how long you remained there in the darkness, your only companions the small things that creep and crawl and feast on dead things, which you were not—not yet.
Eventually you remembered you were not, and a trickle of light spilled back into the scraped-out hollow of your body and you shoved yourself up to stumble through the darkness again searching, ever searching, for the way out. You’ve repeated the steps so often you know them by heart, have walked every path until you’ve cut grooves in the dirt and know the signposts well before you see them, and yet you foolishly hope that this time it will be different.
You should know better. Because every path, though different, is the same. They all lead back to the center where you began this journey, tendrils sprouting from that immortal starting point like veins from a withered black heart, weakly beating out a single truth: there is no path that leads out.
And yet, when inevitably you pass a stranger moving opposite you, you find yourself asking, “Do you know the way out?”
So, do you?