Within a few days, I alone was standing before my new farmhouse and surveying it.
How did I get here, I wondered? It's crazy how you'd never know if someday, you'd be standing in front of what wasn't an apartment, but a full-ass house of your own.
I literally stood there for a good minute and set my life out in front of my mind's eye. So… I was a kid in a fairly normal household. I went to K-12 school for a good fourteen years (if you count preschool), where I didn't make any friends, but graduated with a golden sash and multicolored cords draped around my neck. I went to college for a couple of years, then found myself burying my face in my pillow in the midst of a crisis of the "This isn't going to make me genuinely happy" variety. So I saved up a bit, applied for a bunch of office jobs, got one with Joja somehow, dropped out of school, and got the best apartment I could find in the city where I'd be working. I was there for a good few years, earning and spending money to keep myself alive and mildly entertained while I, like a dumbass, expected my next step in life in the form of an epiphany. But you see, epiphanies know you're looking for them and refuse to show. So it never did.
And now, I owned a farmhouse.
Through some course of events, I had a house and a HUGE plot of property. I could argue this plot of land, which was all mine, was as big as the downtown area itself, which I'd caught a glimpse of before being led here. It was so amazing, the question of how I'd gotten here was as difficult as an algebra problem, and perhaps took just as long to answer.
I went inside and did the same thing. The interior reminded me a lot of the cottage I once went to every summer growing up. It was by a lake. Not a huge lake, but a sizeable body of water. Later on, I decided I wanted to live in one of those someday.
Welp, minus the sizeable body of water (that pond outside was laughable), I was standing within that wish come to fruition.
I scrolled on my phone for a bit, then went to sleep in the comfiest bed I think I'd ever encountered.
When I woke up the next day, I eventually stepped outside and wondered what I was going to do with all this land. I mean, everyone expected me to make this a farm, right? This was a place called Cyan Farm, right?
As someone who'd only lived in a suburban house, three different dorm rooms, and an apartment right in the middle of a huge city… as a born-and-raised city girl… I was lost.
…Well, the one thing I knew immediately is that if this was going to be a farm, some of these trees… okay, most of these trees had to go. There seemed to be a few odds and ends around the house. Maybe there was an axe or something in there.
I went inside and dug around a bit, and sure enough, there one was.
Thank goodness I remembered the one time I saw my granddad chop down an old tree. (Insert higher power here) forbid I go into town and have "How do you chop down a tree?" be the first thing I say to someone ever, possibly even my soulmate. Well, then again, that would have been a cute detail in our love story. You know, "We met because she couldn't handle an axe." But social anxiety deemed the question a cause of death, and that's what was really important.
Not really much to report but that I chopped trees, later discovered that I also had a boulder problem, found a pickaxe in the house, and did stuff until I suddenly blacked out of exhaustion. No big deal.
…Okay, it freaked me out when I woke up in my own bed knowing fully well I did not start the sleep process there.
It made me want to hide under a boulder when I found a letter in my mailbox the next morning saying someone had found me out here, a fucking medical team was dispatched, and that I was billed. Everything I had arrived here with.
And it made me want to kick a boulder seeing I'd only tackled, like, a corner of my property.
And trees were already starting to grow back.