Behatted Acre Woods by Daelen Clark

“HWOOYA”

This was the sound that echoes for at least an hour after waking up in this bizarre forest I had never seen in my life.  It feels chill and crisp like nature is one to do, but also with maple trees in a vibrant painterly orange that nature never has in a sky that seemed to have the sun shining from all possible angles.  Everything feels gigantic to me in the way a child feels when out and about.  A sense that this frightening scale and state of the sky is supposed to be normal.

I can’t help but question everything about this in my mind.   Most especially questioning who I had been before this.  Was this my hat?  It was on me, so it had to be mine, right?  Am I someone who enjoys a dark purple toque with a hot pink phrase on it that I can’t read?  Do the rest of my clothes look the same way?  But the most important question was so loud, it echoed throughout the forest.

“WHERE THE F#@K AM I?”

Because that’s something I haven’t even considered up until now.  I can’t find any identification anywhere, I don’t know what I look like, I don’t know why this matters to me, I don’t know what I did to end up swallowed in a sea of beautiful and majestic trees that I knew I could never climb, nor do I know why I know what everything around me feels like rather above any basic knowledge of the one looking at it.  Knowledge like names, for instance.  I was pretty surprised I knew what a name was, honestly.  I tried to joke with myself that everything could be strange and shocking to me just because I was stupid.  Smart people don’t get lost.  These trees were smarter than me because I could tell they always knew where they were meant to be… just as the realization sunk in on how pathetic I am to be comparing myself to trees in a desperate attempt to loathe myself for something.  The familiarity with this concept was filling me with even more unease.  At this point, I don’t know whether to laugh at my pettiness, hit myself for my pettiness, or be impressed that I remember how to spell “pettiness”.  The fear around me makes those choices much more difficult than I feel they should be.

But one thing jumps out at me to jog my memory… it’s a crunching of my heart, and a breath that shrinks further and further the more I start to see these trees going forever in every direction.  All colossal in scale, filled to the brim with leaves that could hide me from any way out for the rest of time.  Whatever that means at this point.  I lie to myself that I’ve been out of it for half an hour just so I can stop the panic.  Maybe it works because I believe it does, but I don’t fully believe it.  I can feel as though I’ve had to do this more than once before this, so that feeling alone might be enough.   After this, I take a deep breath… several deep breaths… and I think about what I did before I fell asleep.  There isn’t much of an understanding on who I am other than lost, so I decide to go to right before I passed out.  I think back to then, and I’m unable to recall much other than a lot of margaritas, the melody of Top of the World.  A song I remember hearing a lot as a kid, sung terribly by a masculine voice I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.  It confuses me how I can remember trivial things like the names of a song and a drink then I can about my own life, but I brush it off as something that I really liked beforehand that I just call a trait until I can think of a better word.  I think a little more as to where I may have heard that voice before, as I can hear him telling me to not get so agitated by his terrible singing, and it says the name “Gretchen Honey”.  Part of me really hopes this isn’t my name, and that this voice called out to someone else behind me at the time, but another part of me decides that’s the best thing to go by in case anyone else comes walking by.

Then the rest of me raises a good point; “there isn’t anyone else”.

I want to ignore this part.  Because with how beautiful the forest is around me, I can imagine that this is a really elaborate hiking trail like the kinds that I can recall going on.  Just that little extra fact about myself makes me hope I can find something, anything, to get me back to civilization where I can focus on any other problem.  I dismiss how pretentious this may sound, as there is nobody around to hear it, and I come up with an idea.  Since I have this hat, I can put it onto one of the tree branches to mark that this was where I was before.  So that if I end up going in circles, I would be able to tell.  Taking this idea and a conveniently short branch on my right, I place the hat on the branch and move ahead.  If I lose it for good, I don’t have enough of a connection with it to care.  If I end up going the exact opposite way that I’m supposed to, at least I can tell myself that I went somewhere.

I step forward three times, three times looking behind me with the odd fear the hat will fall off, and I move forward.  My head turns straight ahead… to find my hat on a branch right in front of me.  A branch that I’m certain wasn’t there before.  A turn to my left sees the same hat on a branch.  A turn to my right sees the hat on a branch.  A look behind me sees multiple branches on the trees behind me, and identical twenty-seven branches each, all with the same gaudy hat.  Against my better judgement, I look up and see that there are many more branches above me all with the hat as well.

I find this peculiar but that is soon overshadowed by a sense of unyielding rage over the hopelessness of my situation.

I try ripping this hat off the first branch I see and stomping on it just to see if the rest of the trees reflect the actions, and they remain adorned with the many hats despite my many violent stomping.  So, I try walking the direction I was already going on to see if the branches change when nobody is watching.  My first idea was to tiptoe like I can remember doing when trying to leave a room I regret going into for whatever reason, followed by a more mature walk down what I believed to be a path… and the trees still have the hats on their branches no matter the distance or how many times I turn around.  Even the hat I threw onto the ground and covered in dirt with my feet returns to the tree as if it was never taken off.  Despite the markings on the ground that clearly show it was.  The more I look, the more I see that this marking is everywhere on the path alongside my footprints, and the more that bewilderment flares off again and devolves into beratement and anger.

I keep making more prints and impacts in the ground for the rest of the forest to recreate, the shortening breath returns, as does the crunching of my heart.  Whatever anger might be in me, the fear is sharply telling me to knock that off before something even worse happens.  I try to think about that song I remembered hearing butchered by the masculine voice that thinks me closer to it then I know, and I feel as though I often have to step in to ensure there are others around to sing along after him.

“Such a feeling’s coming over me… there is wonder in most everything I see…”

The lyrics come to me as someone who hears it once every month since age twelve.

“Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes, and I… won’t be surprised if it’s a dream.”

The singing in my mind gives way to humming as the marks on the ground disappear, and I more calmly walk through what I’m now calling the hat-rack forest.  The trees stop looking so similar, the branches get more varied in size and length, and I begin to understand what I may have found myself in when I see the trees start to look different.  Some of them slightly shorter… others thin as a twig in the ground, some with colours along their stumps swirling around like wet paint swirling around a shaken canvas.

But the sight that makes me stop, and the most egregious tree around me, is a tree to my left still covered in hats, but with a gigantic dent in it… a dent that has blobs of motor oil and shards of headlights and paint still stuck in it.

The more I think about this situation, the more I remind myself of lingering dreams where time is all over the place as my mind is spinning its wheels until I wake up again, but the serenity is beginning to be overshadowed by the frustration of not being able to wake up fast enough.  I feel a creeping worry coming from this train of thought that I try to keep out.

I stand still with my hands on what looks like the safest part of the wreck, and I think about other dreams more vividly.  I dream of indulging in margaritas so much that it courses through me like blood in veins.  That dream transitions into this persistent masculine voice I keep hearing as a good friend of mine craving to be more than that and offers me many nice daytrips to coerce me.  The most recent one I can recall is in a bar in either a city or country highway.  I accept both possibilities as I start to feel the wind rapidly roaring alongside the engine of a car, and the complete euphoria that comes with such an experience.  I begin to question what these dreams tell me, and it hits me…

They aren’t dreams.  I see events far too specific to the life flooding back to me, and too vivid to be anything but what I fear.

The song has long since left, and all I can hear are two distinct sounds.  The sound of my former saying “I gyottid, honey”, and the loudest crash I have ever heard.  Both repeating one after the other in every direction as the warm colours fade into muted browns and a cyclone around me, carrying the hats and leaves as it roars.

I can feel the shards and splinters flying into my forehead with the blood and pain spilling down onto the rest of my body… and then flying off my body into the cyclone of greys and purples while the trees repeat the crash.  I reel down onto the ground to cry for letting myself get that wasted… letting someone I should have tossed out of my life talk me into it… for being so distant from my family before they died… and for wasting my life before I could even turn thirty-five.

I slowly lose tears to cry out, and I remain curled on the ground ready for the cyclone to consume me.   The crash and the drunken reassurance blend into each other too much for me to tell them apart, so I stop listening… I close my eyes… and it all stops.  There is no more howling, no screeching, no chills, no feeling of ground or anything but the sensation of floating in space.

I refuse to open my eyes again, and I keep waiting to fade into the nothingness I know that death is.  It’s all I feel, and all I deserve.

A scratchy feeling graces my cheek… a couple more follow one after the other… and that ultimately forces me to open my eyes, hoping it’ll finally stop and let me perish… it does not.  In fact, I can’t even tell what I’m looking at.  I attempt to divert my eyes to somewhere else and can only see what looks like snow on trees completely devoid of any hats or car parts. 

The leaves from the trees are bunched together and revolving around a purple sphere that looks like it’s knitted with a hot pink ring around the top of it.  I can recall my mom telling me about how angels look different then in my colouring books, and this… thing… looks the closest to how she tried to explain it.  I can’t figure out what they’re trying to tell me, but there’s a warm feeling that tells me all I need.  They even bring one of these hats… and turns the pink letters to the golden orange I saw within the woods to help me understand just what the hat says.

“You’re the nearest thing to heaven that I see.”

With that, I take one of… what I think are its wings… and I’m looking forward to seeing her again for the first time since the funeral.