#🌟star tag🌟 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cedar-sunshine · 7 months ago

Text

Star Excerpt

I've been going back and forth on posting this for a while, but here it is! Feat: Tristan being depressed, Ori being a little off-putting. This is the VERY beginning of star, the opening words. Comment if you want me to post more anytime/if you liked it!

TWs- internalized transphobia (not incredibly overt), discussion of SI, discussion of death, discussion and minor representation of visual hallucinations.

I wrote this when I was dealing with REALLY severe depression and it hasn't been seriously edited since, so I can't vouch for it being great. Hope you enjoy it!

Tristan

It's getting cold faster than usual this year.

It feels like just yesterday that the first couple of leaves fell from the maples, but now I'm walking over ground that cracks and snaps with frost, and my breath hangs in the air like fog.

With hope, the coming winter will pass just as quickly as fall has been, collapsing in on itself in what remains of my mind. Realistically, I'll probably die before that can happen. The main question now is whether I'll die from the sickness, starvation, hypothermia, murder, or the other option. Guessing which one is going to finally take me out is the only thing left in my life that I could call entertaining, in a twisted, fucked up way. There's also a chance I eat the wrong plant and die from poisoning, but I'd argue that that falls under the last option, especially as I've practically memorized the plants in the northwest. It's been my only pastime for the past year and a half, if you don't count vivid fantasies of my own impending death.

You're never really aware of all the interesting ways one can die until you are, aren't you?

As it is, I've decided that my most likely fate will be turning back on my trail, finding the people who I've been running from with less and less conviction for the past eight months, and letting myself be ripped to pieces in whatever horrifying fashion they desire. It wouldn't be much worse than what's going on in my head already, I'd guess. And they'd be right in whatever gruesome thing they have planned for me. It's not like I haven't been asking for this since I ran.

I'm not exactly sure where I'm going, other than a vague idea of 'east'. If I even have the direction right. For all I know, I've been going in circles for months. I can see the mountains in the distance, though, so I can't be too far off. I know the silhouette of the rockies.

My half-formed plan when I first fled was to get to the rockies and find refuge in a cave, gathering food like a bear in the fall, and then count on my pursuers not being able to survive in the mountains. I'm not sure why I had thought that a half-dead, psychotic fifteen year old with identity confusion would survive out there any better than they would, but it's the only plan I have, and without a plan, I don't really have much to do other than sit down and die.

Honestly, that option has been sounding pretty nice lately.

Still, I'm nothing if not a creature of inertia. Every step, every breath, every heartbeat, only exists because I've lost the energy to do anything other than stay the same. What is in motion stays in motion, even as the friction of my brain tears at me to just stop.

I'm not sure why I don't.

The sun is bleeding up from the horizon, lighting the clouds near it a pinkish golden color, bringing color to a gray sky. The mountains are saturated with dark, vivid blue shadows and patches of gleaming white snow that hurts to look at.

The light burns my eyes, and I refocus my gaze on the ground in front of me where brown and orange leaves are encased in frost, crunching under my footsteps. With the frost, I'll be leaving pretty clear footsteps until the sun fully rises, but I can't bring myself to care. A brutal, ritualistic death, no matter how gory and painful, seems no worse than the other option.

I try to avoid thinking about the future. Whenever I do, the pull to just stop gets almost overwhelming, and the panic that causes makes everything around it worse. The stability of my mind is nothing but a coin flip, and when it's landed on heads, I try to do all I can to avoid flipping it again.

Still, the future isn't the most avoidable thing.

As I watch my worn-out shoes leave a trail in the frost and leaves, my thoughts can't help but drift towards one of my many taboo subjects.

What happens next is perhaps the scariest question I can pose to myself, mostly because I don't actually know the answer.

I can feel my pulse lift and the fog of my mind start to thicken and creep towards the lucidity I've held for almost a week now, if you ignore the flashes of blood and corpses that don't exist hanging from trees in the edges of my vision. My hands clench and unclench, fingers racing along my palms, ruined nails scratching at my rough skin.

It's not proper for a girl to have such un-ladylike hands.

It's not proper for a girl to cut her hair and hide in the woods on her own, either, is it?

Perhaps the question of what's proper for a girl isn't the most important thing right now.

I take a deep breath, trying to calm my burning mind. This part of the forest doesn't have as much undergrowth as usual- notably, it's missing the rampant salal and huckleberries that I've been seeing around here, along with the old growth trees and logs that scaffold the way for smaller plants. I'd guess that it was clear-cut before the disaster, and is maybe five years out from it.

I wonder if the forest knows that it's safe now, that the power tools are dead and the constant consumerist demand has died with most of the world's population. I wonder if its trauma will live on in its occupants, teaching its deer to flee at any movement and its flowers to hide in the deepest, thickest tangles of plants. I wonder if it knows that the world has changed. Maybe it can feel that the human feet that used to trample it have lessened, and maybe it feeds on the corpses and can taste their disease and fear. Perhaps it remains unaware, always living in fear of the next hunting season or the return of the lumber companies and hikers who tear up the native plants and bring with them grasses and Himalayan blackberries. Perhaps it can see me walking through its trees and it wonders what a child so clearly unfit for this life is doing. Perhaps it waits for me to give up and die, so it can welcome me to its soil and bring me home. Perhaps it sees me as only another of the ones that have torn it from its roots and killed its children and brothers, and it only feels distrust and hatred. Perhaps it still wishes I would give up and die, but only so my threatening existence ends.

Perhaps it's just wood and leaves, and I've truly lost what's left of my mind.

I wonder what it thinks of me, if it looks beyond my humanness and sees that the blood running through my veins is the same as what pulses in its children, a cousin of the golden sap that bleeds from its bark. I wonder who it sees.

A girl with rough hands and a shattered mind, maybe. Or a boy who's met death and come back, rather unwillingly. Maybe it only sees a scared child running blindly, or an animal that sacrificed its humanity to keep its straining, breaking heart beating in its chest. Maybe something else entirely, something that's fading away from the inside out and barely even still going.

I wonder who I would see, if I was brave enough to look.

Orion

I go over the bear trap one last time, making sure that it's not being blocked by anything. It's on its last legs, rusty and creaky. It's not a pretty beast, but it does the job, even if the job might give me tetanus one day. I don't really have another option right now, so I choose to remain positive. I have it set on a rough game trail, with the jaws and trigger covered in vines and leaves. I've got a camp set up in a small cave by a cliff less than a mile from the trap, so I can check it every evening, along with the rope ones that I have on other trails. With luck, I'll get something in a couple days, hopefully big enough to last me through the winter. I dream of the day when I get a moose in my traps.

Once I get a catch, I can dry the meat for the winter, and then next spring I'll keep going east and get over the mountains. The east of the mountains is more habitable than the west, so I'll keep looking for a town of survivors there.

I know that there are people out there, and I know that those people have probably grouped up and started rebuilding societies. It'll take a bit to convince them that I'm not sick, and that I'm not there to steal their resources, but I know I can do it. People like me. I like to think that I've held on to most of my charm through what I can only really describe as the apocalypse. Maybe I'll start a family, if I meet someone there who's sweet and pretty, someone who thinks I am too. Maybe we can find a stray dog and live a small, nice life. I just need to take it step by step, and the next step is finding food.

I've always wished that I knew a bit more about plants, especially since the sickness hit and I've been doing this all on my own. I know the basics- thimbleberries, chanterelles, cedar- but not much more than that. I think it'd be helpful to be one of those people who can dig food from the ground during winter. I'm dealing, though. Perhaps a diet consisting mainly of meat isn't the healthiest thing, but I'd say that I'm actually doing pretty well, given the whole apocalypse situation.

The cliff that I've made my temporary home in is only maybe ten or fifteen feet tall, on the base of a relatively steep hill. The cave's entrance is much shorter than me, but if I crouch, I can get in and into the more sizable inner part, where I still can't really stand up. I have coils of rope shoved into a corner, and I toss my beat-up backpack on top of them before sitting on my equally used sleeping bag. It's developed rips and holes that make it not much more useful than a warm blanket, but a warm blanket is still something.

I've adopted a crepuscular lifestyle more recently, altering my waking time to match that of the wildlife. I set my traps early in the morning and check them long after the sun sets. It took me a bit, but I get around five hours of sleep every time I try, amounting to maybe ten every day. I spend the rest of my time either maintaining my body or fantasizing about the town I'll find in eastern Washington. It's not the most exciting life, but it's nice to have some routine in a world like this.

I don't feel very tired yet, so I pull over my backpack and dump its contents on the base of the cave, searching through them. My two extra knives are tied together with a worn out length of twine, along with my flint in its' case, and my bunched-up, too-large raincoat unfolds on the ground, along with a medley of other things, but it only takes me a few moments to find what I was looking for.

When I was a kid, I got three journals for one of my birthdays. I wrote through one of them before the virus hit, and the second one was finished frantically in the first few months. Those two will be burnt to ashes when I have the time, kindling soaked with things that aren't worth remembering. The one I've been using for the past year or so is about halfway through, with my ideas and feelings journaled about once a week. Most of it is plans, maps, paths over the mountains, dotted with records of where I set traps. I'm no artist, but I've sketched out ideas of what a surviving society might look like. Abstract maps are my strength.

I flip to a new page and pull my pencil out of the inner pocket on my backpack, and begin writing.

When I wake in the evening, my head rests uncomfortably on my open journal, with a messy, half finished list of the steps I'll need to take to get over the rockies. My spine aches from being curled up like a dead shrimp for hours, and when I stretch it cracks more than I think should be healthy. It's colder than it was in the morning, but I push myself to get up and shove my stuff back into my bag.

The sky is gray outside, and the air is that sort of sharp cold that hurts a bit to breathe. Every inhale reminds me that winter is soon, and that I'll be over the rockies by this time next year. Maybe I'll even have found my survivors by then, and I'll have my little life set up. I'm sure any little budding village would be happy to have a young member with trapping knowledge, someone who can contribute and still has his whole life ahead of him.

The trail I've set my traps on takes about two hours to fully complete, and a bit more with my care to avoid my own traps. I've made that mistake once, and I never plan to make it again.

The bear trap is surprisingly well hidden for a metal jaw in the leaves- its rust blends in with the leaves scattered over it, and if I wasn't aware of its existence and studying every step I take, there's a good chance I'd lose a leg to it. I feel a twinge of apology for whatever poor thing gets caught in my trap, but we all need to eat. Anyways, it's probably no more violent than any of the other ways a thing could die out here.

I return to my little cave as the first couple of raindrops start hitting the leaves, and I curl up in my sleeping bag to stay warm as I watch the rain fall.

It's hypnotizing, in a way. The quiet roar is the loudest thing in the woods, and it drowns out any other sound. Within half an hour, the rain has turned from a gentle patter to a downpour, turning the world gray outside of the cave. The cave has a helpful slant that keeps the water from running down to where I'm sitting, but the cold still ends up saturating my skin, soaking through me just as quickly as the rain would.

I lie down and turn away from the cave entrance. There's no better time to sleep than during a rainstorm.

☆☆☆

That's chapter one of star! Thanks for reading (:

#writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing blog #writerscommunity #🌟star tag🌟#excerpts #my writing #🌟excerpt from star🌟

6 notes · View notes