Impulsive
January 21st, 1982
Alaska
(Valeri Santos)
Unable to sleep, I stared out my window at the frozen landscape. The foot of snow we'd had dumped on us earlier that day glistened in the light of the nearly full moon. As corny as it sounded, even to ten-year-old self, it looked like magic. Despite being well below freezing outside, to me the forest looked inviting. The fresh blanket of snow on the ground, both covering and being covered by the canopy of trees…
I felt a squeezing sensation at my heart the longer I stared. I felt my fingers twitch, and cured them around my comforter to cease the self-distraction. The muscles in my back gradually became tense as the feeling in my chest increased.
I wanted to go out there. I wanted to run and play among the trees, to know the forest by the light of the moon as I did by the sun.
I read somewhere that if you sleep in the moonlight you'll go mad. My bedroom curtains are never closed. Maybe that's what this feeling was. But I couldn't go out there; I was nothing more than a mere human, and, because I wasn't fully grown, a pathetically sized one at that. There were things in those woods that would gobble me up for a midnight snack, and if they didn't then a temperature would do me in.
Yet still, the forest called to me.
I rolled over, facing away from my window now, and eventually fell asleep. That night, I dreamt of running.