The Empty Forest

Tuesday night, I tagged along with my boyfriend to his intermural softball game. He wanted to arrive twenty minutes before the game started to get in some additional practice, so I hesitantly agreed to leave early. Even though I’ve been to his games dozens of times, and honestly once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, I went along for moral support. We drove to a nearby park and the sun was already low in the sky. As I stepped out into the darkness, I shuffled slowly behind him as he tread hastily to join his teammates.

For the longest time, I stood in silence, quivering with each bone-chilly gust of wind. The teams practiced for the game, chucking balls across the vacant field at each other, quite a few of them missing me by mere inches. My eyes weren’t on the lit baseball field, nor on the stands where older men half-drunkenly catcalled the young female players with Miller Lite in their hands. Rather, my eyes laid on the forest. I’d been to Riverside Park several times before, for picnics and games, but never before at night. Let alone on a late October night such as this one.

No crickets chirped happily as they did in the late summer nights. No birds cheeped or screeched at each in the branches of the trees as they did in the early months of spring. No owls stood watch over the field as they had in the earlier months of fall. No deer explored the twilight wonderland as they did in the spring with newborn fawns at their side. Nothing but silence and darkness. Vast darkness, expanding and engulfing the trees, swallowing them. Lonely darkness without life. The kind of lonely, empty darkness that only the haunting month of October can brew.

The darkness was haunting, but it gave the familiar forest a fresh personality. The adventurer in me told me to venture out into the darkness. Whenever I would feel the urge to stray away from the blindingly brilliant bright light of the stadium, a little voice would always whisper in my ear, “but, what if….”. There were so many if’s and why’s to explain my reasons from straying. Rapists, murderers, raccoons, getting lost, the list went on. Something about the daringness of the trees to stand as solemnly and strongly as they did in the darkness made me want to join.

Meanwhile, in the background I heard the elder men in their camouflage jackets catcalling, bringing me back to reality. The empty forest was still there, watching the game as it always did, enduring and witnessing man’s undertakings. Calling out to those readily and willingly seeking comfort in the dense forest’s embrace. As I turned away, I felt as though I was turning my back on an old friend, and slowly walked away.