Dear Mother,
You’ve asked that I record my daily activities in the woods. You’re afraid I might be kidnapped, get lost, or worse. You promised not to read this diary and only to use it should I not come home by sundown. I agree that the woods are dangerous, but I know how to stay safe. I love the woods. And the woods love me.
I have always spent time in these dark woods by our home, ever since I was a child. My fondest memories are of jumping in mud puddles and collecting berries in spring. Once I leave their shady canopy, the world feels strange, dreamlike, distant. Even as I feed or pet Ginger, I wonder if she might be some small lynx disguised as a docile house-cat. It’s only when I return to the woods that the world feels alive once more.
I feel that I am a different man in the woods. My mind moves strangely. My choices feel nonsensical when I consider them later. I forget things – and I feel that those lost memories are held by something else that lives there still.
For all your concerns, you are the one who damned me at birth: you named me Forest. Of course the woods would call to me. But I am grateful. For as all your tales of carnivorous woods and their strange hunger terrified me as a child, they also filled me with a reverie profound respect for the wilderness, which has kept me safe.
I know you'd rather I find other work: the paltry sums I accrue clearing forest paths are meager at best. What I wish I could make you understand is that it's not about the miserly stipend the county gives me – somehow, I know with a tenacious certainty that if I’m able to clear a path to the other side of the woods, we will all be able to escape this place alive.
I acknowledge, of course, that the work is tiring. The mud is cloying. There are days I dream of sailing – a broad, clean horizon, an open sky. Perhaps that is what I will find when I make it through.