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Woods

Yeardley Mruzek

Eager, hopeful, idealized, on an impossible trek
Through a forest thick; Greenery crossed with branches
Walling out intruders until they can’t move forward, but,
 
Just pull out a sketchpad
And draw yourself a path.
Shade a crystal stream you could follow to a city made of sunlight.
Take a rest from this trek to sculpt a reality so smooth you open your pad
And confuse the scribbles with the photographs.


But as the sketched trees receive more detail
From my fiercely gripped pencil
The paper gets clogged until there’s no more white.
Only scrawls I accept as reality.
And I forget that the branches better the forest’s trees
Where birds land and build their nests
And sing.
This is justice in the forest.
 
What kind of person is the person who is incomplete?
Not to themself, but to me?
The one whose spaces I fill up with experiences that are less their own
And more mine.
 
Do I want to be him? Be like him? Like him? Do I want to be the person I idealize
him to be? Do I fear becoming the person I was paranoid of him being? Is it really
ignoring his real self if I never knew it?
What kind of person?
The kind of person who posthumously proves that all the suspicions I had didn’t
mean anything (a good thing).
And is burnt into ashes on the other side of the globe (this is only how I
think of it)
I want to be strong enough to escape a life assigned to me by someone who only
knew my name (I’m not).
I want to be the survivor of a trauma that only exists within the world of a few simple
lies (I’m not).
I want to be complex in ways that no fiction writer could ever fabricate (I am?).
I want to be burnt into ashes with no one by my side (I won’t).