I carried the forest in my eyes.

They saw it, all who looked into my eyes and sought their own reflection but did not find it. They saw the deer, and the rabbits, and the trees, and the quiet stream where I often drank the water that would have made any mortal youthful again, if they could find it. They never could, of course.

I carried the forest over that long road in the search for others of my kind, through snow and rain and strange men and that even stranger time, dream-like to me now, when I became something other. There was a magician, I think, and a man who loved me, though the images grow fainter every day.

I carried the forest back home with me on a road that should have been trodden flat with the hooves of my brothers and sisters, but that I walked alone, as I had walked it before. We are solitary creatures. Perhaps I had forgotten that, living so long alone in my forest. The hundreds, perhaps thousands that I drew from the ocean walked their own roads to their own homes, distant forests that I had never visited. They did not thank me, or visit my forest. I did not expect them too.

I carried the forest in eyes that followed a solitary road back to the only home I had ever known. I did not long for companionship. I am like others of my kind, content in the knowledge that we walk the earth again, but not desiring company. Only a small part of me wanted a walking partner in the long road home. Perhaps I had grown accustomed to it, in those days and weeks spent with companions that I barely remember.

I carried the forest back to those who had watched over me for years—for centuries, even—to find them waiting exactly as I had left them, as if they had not moved from that spot. They looked into my eyes and saw themselves, and then they went back to the business of being animal and forest, as though my absence had never happened.

I carry the forest in my eyes when I lean over that stream now on legs that seem weaker than they once were. My kind do not die, it is believed, but I have journeyed where my kind have never journeyed, changed in ways my kind have never changed. Some of these changes remain.

I will carry the forest in my eyes as my coat grows thinner and I sleep more often than I wake. I do not know what the manner of my end will be. It is possible that I will not die, because I cannot, but that I will fade with the forest, for one cannot live without the other. My eyes will gleam clear and empty, and the trees and the animals around me will vanish, swallowed into the mists of time and space that have kept my world alive.

I will carry this forest in my eyes and bring it to wherever it is that my kind return to. Has it given me a soul, this change? Have I been granted that flighty mortal dream that staves off the fear of death? It comforts me somehow, to know that I will go on. That this forest will live inside of me, though it vanishes from the earth.

I will carry it home.