Footprints in the Vanishing Woods
The expedition started with a map that seemed to breathe when we spoke aloud its coordinates. By daybreak, two tents stood empty, and the camp stove hissed as if it remembered a meal we had never eaten. The forest did not scream or tremble; it simply lowered its head and watched, as if waiting for us to admit we had never belonged there in the first place.
I was the last to leave the trailhead, a guide who believed in the comfort of markers and cairns, in the certainty of footsteps that didn’t vanish into rumor. Yet as we pushed deeper, the trees grew closer, the light smaller, and the air tasted like rain iron. It wasn’t the missing gear or the absence of their voices that unsettled me the most, but the ground itself, which kept changing under our boots, as if the earth were shifting its memory with every step.
- Bootprints pressed into mud, too rounded, the toes curling slightly inward, as if the wearers had learned a secret they could not forget.
- Branches snapped at ankle height, not from wind but from a deliberate, patient rhythm—a message left for someone who would not understand until much later.
- Patchy moss that refused to grow where our shadows touched, creating a corridor of dark, almost judgmental footprints that we could not walk through without feeling watched.
- Compass needles that spun to face the forest, and then settled, stubborn, when pointed toward what we thought was north.
- Footprints that retraced themselves, circling back to the last place where the air had tasted of fear and the air had a name.
In the quiet between gusts, I found a journal wedged under a rock, the pages damp and ink blurred as if the rain had tried to erase the authors' thoughts and failed. The entry was short, almost polite, as if written by someone who knew the reader would come across it years later:
We followed their laughter until the trees forgot our names. If you are reading this, you already know what we forgot to tell you: the woods do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembered back.
The words settled in my chest like a stone. The expedition had not merely vanished; it had become a hinge on which the forest turned. We pressed on, driven less by hope than by the stubborn belief that every trail has a boundary, and every boundary has a keeper. The whispers grew louder, not in words, but in the rhythm of footsteps that did not belong to anyone we recognized. A voice, not mine, counted the breaths behind me, luring me toward a clearing where the light hung in the trees like a veil.
When the last glow of dusk bled away, I understood: the footprints were never to guide us home. They were a signature, a warning, a lullaby written by the woods to remind us that some journeys end where they began—with the forest swallowing the map, and the map swallowing us in return. I did not look back as I moved forward, for forward had learned to erase itself as it walked.