The first secret

tie a rope around your neck, and let me kick you off a bungee I had crawled beneath a mangled bush, giving up on the search for anything other than this damn rainforest. I was too tired, exhausted and emotionally drained, and in that wake, annoyed. Each little chirp from an animal, hum from some hidden force, each scream that ripped from the throat of something, someone, had me gritting my teeth because I just wanted silence. Now more than ever, I wanted the consuming loneliness to eat me whole, to chew me up and spit me out, let me rot the way the animals did with my magic stretching out in my vicinity. It a short sputter, it's a weak croak of rot unlike the fleeting moments in Helovia, when I could feel the flesh of animals burst and blister in my wake as I ran, as I wept and thrashed out and I fell to ruin. The Rift had weakened me, had weakened all of us, and now we were vulnerable. So tucked away I remain, beneath the wet, thorny embrace of a bush, listening to the patter of rain against leaves and fat drops of condensation slipping down to the ground. I could hear the chirp of mutated birds and the prowling steps of beasts I cannot see, always too rigid, always on the edge, ready to bolt in a moment's notice. So when I have to listen to someone very close to me scream and holler, not quite into the forest, but perhaps overhead? I can hear her fury, her spite against the world for what I can only assume is a burning rage against whatever curse she has been given, perhaps I too would be screaming into the sky, but I would look like a mad fool with the way I look - I'd be crushed beneath the same labels my mother had been forced to live under. To be mocked, to be avoided, pushed aside and forgotten, deemed too crazy for the world to handle. How sick. I rise from beneath the bush, skin snagging against a mess of thorns and tangled branches, giving a quick shake before snorting at the besmirched woman who howls at the empty sky. "Maybe if you yell a little louder they'll hear you?" It's sarcastic, biting back blunt outrage because the annoyance is unfathomably present, eating away at my sorrows as I speak in the general direction of the shouts, unsure of whether I successfully spoke to another horse or if I was attempting to spark conversation with a tree.

@Erthë