Dryad

Awaking

I was waiting to die and yet I felt more like I was sleeping. I could hear my breathing, my heartbeats, all the silence and lack of thoughts in my head. The pressure around the neck disappeared along with all the pain. And then suddenly a voice that was not mine, but seemed so familiar even though I had never heard it clearly before:

-We cannot let you leave. We cannot kill something that has loved us so much all these years.-the voices said as one.

I felt the roots going over me and growing around me, binding my body and limbs. My veins filled with rain water, my blood replaced by water, my lungs filled with moss, my skin got overgrown with fungus and lichen. I was cold and asleep on my bed of leaves, and then I felt alive again.

I felt the birds jumping over me as if they were checking to see if I was alive, and their voices woke me up. My movement startled them and chased them to the nearby branches and it was as if they were studying whether I would really get up. I tried to let my voice out, but I could only make some vague sounds - I couldn't speak. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't put a single word together as if my vocal cords had failed.

I got up and started walking through the forest over the path I knew well, and my feet took me back home. I went through the old paths that no one uses and arrived in front of the old place where they used to take me. Someone has been here very recently, I can tell by the footprints in the grass. Maybe father even bothered to send someone to find me. I hopped across the meadow and field avoiding other people's eyes and arrived not far from our property. There I saw my father walking alone along the road.

It's really not hard to recognize my father even among people. He is thin and old, older than one would expect, but he got me in his older age, and he is always dressed more expensively than others. As usual, his long gray hair is loose and visible against his black coat, and his hands are placed behind his back with long fingers interlaced, from which a ring usually shines. I almost ran after him, I wanted to call him, but I couldn't. I slowly walked up behind him, and he turned to me after hearing my footsteps.

He was looking at me, and at the same time it was as if he was looking through me, as if he did not believe that it was me. I tried to speak again, but I couldn't do anything. And how can I tell him that it's me, that I'm alive and nothing happened to me? For a moment he acted as if he wanted to say something to me or check that it was really me, but he just turned and left. He must have believed that he only saw the vision that was appearing to him and that he had finally got mad. For some reason I felt so upset. I wanted so much to escape and be free, and now he is abandoning me. I can't even go back home.