Don't close your eyes

Rebirth

Pain. Cold. Wet. Rustling? Your arms are lying against something familiar, but you can't quite figure out what. Your head feels sore and you feel like you've been asleep for a month.

Forcing your eyes open, it's like the sandman spilled his whole bag in your face. You lift your hand up to gently touch your head, inspect it carefully. It honestly feels like you got hit by a truck, but somehow also like it's been left untouched.

You push yourself to a sitting position, grimacing. Your limbs feel like they're going to fall off. Suddenly all sensation throughout your body is replaced with pins and needles. All blood rushes to your head and momentarily you lose vision, though, it goes away just as quick.

Gently turning your head you look at your surroundings. It sure was cold and wet like you thought. You're in the woods, next to a small incline and a tree. The tree is thick and tall and half of its leaves have fallen. You don't recall ever being in a forest with trees this big before, it's incredible.

Now that you think about it, you can't... You can't remember much of anything... Not how you got here, your family, your home or your own identity even.

You carefully compose yourself but it's easier said than done. ' Phew. Thank god I can stand. I hope I can walk too or this is gonna get unnecessarily difficult.'

The moon shines a light on the leaves decorating the ground, and they shine back like little stars. Taking steps forward you feel the muck between your toes. Huh? Looking down you don't see any shoes? And your pants are dirty, about to come apart from the seams too.

Well, the leaves may be dirty but at least they're soft. Hopefully you manage to steer clear of sharp rocks and sticks though.

' All these trees look absolutely identical. How am I supposed to know which way to go? I don't wanna end up going in circles. God, I hope this forest isn't too big.'

Anxiety starts to crawl up your neck. What if this is one of those huge forests, like a nature preserve? You've seen whole documentaries about innocent people just wanting to have a nice walk in nature, away from the city, to then end up in a pile of missing persons report case files.

Shit. If that's the situation it could take you days to get out of there... And somehow it feels like you're not gonna survive before that.

You begin walking in a straight line ahead. There's no path so it doesn't matter which way you pick. It had been maybe five minutes before you hear a distant rumbling noise.

' Is that... A car!' Surely enough you do hear a car engine. You can hear it rumbling from straight ahead, maybe a little to the left. Now from straight ahead, and now...

' Wait. Wait... It's going too quickly! It's gonna pass me, wait!!!'

You limp through the trees and bushes as fast as you can without hurting your sore joints, in hopes of reaching it before it completely drives off. However, the sound starts growing fainter with each passing second.

Shit. The car drove away.

Disappointedly, you continue your journey until you arrive near a small rock face with faint lights coming behind it... Yes! Those gotta be street lights!! Relief washes over you. There must be a city!

Excitedly you hurry up again closer to the edge. Arriving at a spot where you can see the road and street lamps, dread fills you once more. No wonder you only heard one car passing by earlier. It's literally in the middle of nowhere!

Next to the road there are more street lights, but behind them the forest continues to extend downhill. Looks like this road is attached to a small hill and the forest on the other side continues to a vast valley covered with more trees. Or at least that's what you guess since it's still kind of hard to see the dark background with the street lights in front of it.