Trapped

It was cold; colder than before. I shivered as my bare feet touched the icy ground and glanced around. I knew I should have gone back, but I didn't; my goose bumped skin showing faintly through my thin floral night dress. I heard a twig snap in the distance, and froze, my foot suspended in mid-air halfway between me and the ground. I turned around and ran, stumbling and tripping; my gasping breath and blundering the only sound in the frosty, dark night air. I stopped again and felt as if the air was closing in on me. I didn't know where to go, spinning round and round, looking for some way out. Everything was getting closer, more claustrophobic, and I fell to the ground, my head spinning and my body slowly shutting down; too cold to obey my commands. The feel of the steamy breath on my neck as something came closer, closer…, sensed rather than saw it open its mouth and bare its razor sharp teeth, it's frosty pine cone smell enveloping me. I shut my eyes, wishing it would end; all of it; waiting, waiting; waiting for the searing pain to rip through me and then for the bliss of nothing when my chest would stop rising, my heart to stop beating, my blood to stop pumping. My eyes flickered open and I took in the tall pine trees growing strong and tall; the delicately dusted ground; and the inky, black sky overhead and my eyes shut slowly again, blotting out the world as a blanket was thrown over my consciousness.

I died.

I do not feel the cold anymore, I do not feel the pain. I lie there, frozen in time, as the trees grow their roots around me and over me. Trapping me. A body in the ground flawlessly preserved; doomed to lie in that final resting place - never to be freed. Just another object part of the other thousands and thousands of objects. I dream as I lie there about what it would have been like if I wasn't trapped there; who I would have been and all the things I could have done - if it hadn't ended this way. Tears roll down my face and freeze to ice; forever to remind me of all the dreams and thoughts. So I lie there for all eternity and birds make a nest in my hair, the trees grow taller; and I watch the passing of time, trapped. I smile sadly as I hear children laughing in the distance, missing the carefree joy that I used to have. The flowers grow around me and they comfort me with their reassuring smells, and I grow old trapped in a body of what I used to be, my memories dying slowly with me. I long for happiness and joy, the gift of movement and laughter, knowing all the while that the people I loved have died and moved on without me, as I live on forever.