WYG Prompt: I was living in a forest...

Today's post comes from a writing prompt from the Write Your Grief course I'm taking. The prompt was: I was living in a forest...

I was living in a forest, lush and green. It was a forest that grew with us and around us; it was a forest that we created with our love.

The tall trees housed beautiful birds that swooped out of the sky, singing lyrical songs. Hummingbirds emerged from the shrubs to astonish us with their speed and their seemingly physics-defying maneuvers. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere. The paths through the forest were soft and lovely, carpeted with soft leaves and grass. There were clearings here and there, where we could sit and just be together, wondering at this beautiful thing we made.

Our love created an entire world, and we lived in it together. We tended it, and we tended each other. 

Then, suddenly, you were gone, and the lush, warm, beautiful forest we so lovingly nurtured  became a terrifying place: the birds stopped singing; the canopy of leaves grew so thick that no sunlight could penetrate. The wildflowers have been replaced by prickly thistle. The clearings are overgrown with poison ivy. 

Desperate, I look everywhere for you, or for signs of you. I look for signs of me. I look for something, anything, that will make me believe that you were real - that we were real - that you’re still real and still here. I find nothing but my memories.

Maybe our forest was never lush and green and beautiful. Maybe the birds never sang. Maybe the wildflowers were always weeds, and the clearings always toxic. Maybe the beauty of our forest was something that never existed in reality, but was instead a virtual reality we could experience only when we were together?

Which leaves me here, in this terrifying place where I recognize nothing, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t leave this forest, because it’s my home. I can’t change it back to what it was when you were here, because that forest cannot exist without us both. And I can’t grow a new forest on my own, because it was you who had the green thumb: I can’t grow anything.

I’m trapped, and lost, longing for a world that no longer exists, if it ever really did.