A group of young runaways, who once thought they had nothing to lose, create their own secret utopia in the shadow of a dangerously seductive idea that threatens to unravel it all.
Addison Walker, the eco-activist with the steamy mugshot, is fresh o...
I'd spent plenty of time alone in dark woods before, hiking and camping by myself, so being left alone then shouldn't have put me on edge, but it did. With the fire going, it made the surrounding forest seem like an impenetrable sheet of black, and the sounds that came from it were disproportionately unnerving.
But the things I was scared of, I knew weren't normal. Whenever there was a strange sound, my mind always jumped to the supernatural; to things I'd stopped believing in, or at least had been trying not to believe in.
When I was in high school, I used to leave the house late at night, after my mom had fallen asleep. I'd always wait until I was all the way in the woods before I ever cried, or wrote a sad song, or did whatever I had to do to be able to make it through the next day. It was in the forest of my childhood that I started to have experiences with things I couldn't explain. Sometimes I would hear something running towards me, with footsteps as even as a drumbeat—as if there was a straight path between me and it, with no trees or branches to slow it down. I would never see what it was, but it would come at me so fast, like I was standing on the tracks of an invisible train. It would disappear the second it passed through me, but for a split second I always felt something cold and foreign rush under my skin. Another time, I was lying down in a clearing when a white figure with a lopsided gate sped past like a blurred ghost, whose shape and size I couldn't relate to any animal I'd ever seen before. A time before that, I caught a white feather against my chest, and when I knelt down with it in a clearing, a downward force came over me, blowing my hair in all directions. When I looked up, all the surrounding trees bent away as if being blasted by a single gust of nuclear force of which I was at the centre of, only to return back to normal immediately after. These sort of things would happen often, but only in the woods, and I was drawn to them because of it.
Whatever was happening, it was letting me believe in something more than what I previously knew. When I started to see colours around plants, I began learning everything I could about energy and healing; all of the stuff my mom used to talk about. It took over my life, my imagination—everything. I thought if I tried really hard, I might be able to help her in some kind of Adam Dreamhealer way, and if I couldn't, then at least I'd have opened myself up to believing in something beyond mainstream reality, even if it was just my subconscious conjuring up these experiences to comfort my surface self.
My mom wasn't just sick; she was dying, and I needed to feel helpful, or in the very least I needed to know that there wasn't going to be a cold hard cut off at the end of it. I needed to know that when it was over, I'd still be able to feel her, because I didn't want to do life without her. But it's risky, I think, to play so close to the edge like that. It's hard to know when to stop. I was alone so much that I started to lose all reference points for what was normal for most people.
I'm embarrassed about how real I let all that stuff become. Even sitting alone by that fire, my cheeks turned warm with a syrupy feeling that I guessed was shame, or something like it. That path is the one I got lost on; it's the path that led me to Eagle. It was all so innocent in the beginning, but after my mom died it got out of control.
We always used to talk about the ways in which I'd still be able to feel her when she was gone. On nights when she was really bad, the only thing I found comfort in was believing that, when it happened, I'd get to be closer to her than I could have ever been if we were both in physical form. We talked about how I would be able to tell the difference between her presence and the wind, and the places we'd meet in my dreams, and how, if I sat really still and asked questions, I'd be able to hear her answers. We had it all planned out.
At first I thought I could feel her, but as time went on it seemed that what I was feeling was more just an echo of her life, rather than her actually being there. I thought something must be wrong with me; that I wasn't spiritual enough, or focused enough. All the experiences I'd been having leading up to her death, that I thought were spiritual, came to a screeching halt.
In my travels, I kept getting drawn towards new-agey type stuff, and kept going deeper and deeper. Spiritual types kept telling me I had all the potential in the world, telling me they saw something in me, and that I was special. I was naive; I didn't know they told the same thing to everyone. I believed them, and so I started to feel different. That feeling was like a drug. I was always looking for more intense experiences, and soon it became about more than just wanting to feel closer to my mom.
When I heard about the opening at AARC, I was at spiritual plateau, where a familiar numbness was setting it. I needed something stronger and I walked right into Eagle's arms. I tended towards extremes, and Eagle was at the very far end of the spectrum. I wasn't interested in balance; I wanted to find the limit and Eagle was all about it. He was going to take me there.
With Eagles help, I felt like I'd found the end of everything; like I had found the far edge of the world. And the view... I wouldn't even know where to begin in describing it. It calls to you like a siren song. It consumes you. You think you need it—that it's the only thing. Coming back from that edge was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and it was an invisible battle that only I knew—only I saw. There's something so isolating about that. Talking about it is like talking about an abstract dream. You can't expect anyone to care, let alone believe you when you try to tell them that some dreams are more real than life; that maybe we have it backwards. The same way the laws of traditional mechanics don't apply to what's happening on a quantum level, the external world doesn't always match up with what we experience deep in our own caves of consciousness.
When it was over, I just wanted to be able to relate to the world everyone else lives in again. I wanted to go back to a world where being touched by him was wrong; where eleven hours inside a cold tank was objective torture. I wanted a world that gave me words to define what happened to me, so I could move on.
Thing is, I still don't think I'm there yet. Some days, I'm not even close.
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