I couldn’t breathe. It was a black night in mid October, with a waning crescent moon that provided next to no light. The darkness of the forest didn’t help with spreading the limited light, for the leaves created a canopy overhead. The leaves that had fallen last autumn were late in their stages of decomposition, yet they still crunched underfoot. They mixed with the newly fallen leaves, still too fresh and tender to crunch. All that surrounded me now, though, was darkness, no moon in sight, and dirt all over. In my hair, my eyes, my mouth, my lungs. Although not able to see it, I could feel some of the dirt on my head growing wet with sticky blood from a fresh wound on my head, inflicted by someone unknown to me. The dirt grew heavier on my chest as I struggled to pull air into my lungs, and I could feel my body screaming for more oxygen. A dark feeling settled in my chest, and it finally registered. I was going to die.

My breathing grew into a hard effort, with straggling breaths coming into my desperate lungs far too weakly and with too much time in between. I could hear the blood rzushing through my veins, my heart desperately trying to keep me alive even though my brain knew I stood no chance. The pressure of the dirt piling on top of me continued to grow, until I could feel my bones on the verge of snapping due to the extreme amount of weight they were being forced to carry. It had been too long. Too long for me to not have air in my lungs, too long for my bones to stand up to this immense pressure, and too long for my heart to keep fighting when the rest of me had given up.

I felt my heart burst. Pain shot through my body and I screamed into a muffled nothingness, the blackness fading away into nothing.

The world was empty. I couldn’t feel anything. All of the last things I had seen before I was tossed carelessly into my grave were covered in a hazy veil of fog. The oak tree I climbed as a child, with my initials carved into the highest point I could reach. The rope swing hanging from a birch tree not far away, where my father would push me, singing along with the birdsongs. The divot in the ground filled with lush green grass where Mom was buried. Ten years flashed by in my mind, back to the day where I came home from school to my father’s red-rimmed eyes. He held his shovel in one hand and a smaller one in his other, just for me. That day, my six-year-old self and my father buried my mother’s bloody, beaten, and bruised body into the comfort of the earth. I thought it was normal.

Next to my mother’s grave was a fresh mound of dirt, a large shovel driven into the top of it. My breath (if you could even call it breath) caught, and I realized that was where my body lay. I was dead, buried right next to my mother.

A slight movement caught my eye in the shadows, and I turned to it. A dark figure was slinking away into the darkness, just as my dog would when she got in trouble for eating the trash. I ventured towards them, yet stopped short when they glanced behind their shoulder.

HIS shoulder, I should say. My father’s. Not only had he killed my mother, he had killed me. Suddenly, all I wanted was revenge, to make my father feel for all of his wrongs he ever committed. Venturing after him, my pace picked up, and once I realized that I was able to move through trees, I gave no notice to my surroundings. I just wanted to make him pay.

I caught up, and I was on top of him, hovering over his shoulder. He was shivering, pulling his thin jacket closer around his burly shoulders as he looked around warily for the phantom he could sense was following him, the phantom that was me. His only daughter, the one that he told over and over was the love of his life after her mother. So why would he do it? Why murder her in cold blood? Why throw away the only person he had left to love him?

These questions were pounding over and over again in my thoughts relentlessly. They consumed my being, screaming at me as I watched the man who raised me and cared for me whirl around in dizzying circles, terrified. His eyes were wide, silently begging for help, yet he was looking for compassion far too late. I sat silently, seething with anger, and he finally stopped spinning and broke into a full-on run, being chased by his demons of the past. Following close behind him, I watched him coming to insanity, not able to escape from his own thoughts and realities that lived inside his head. When he tripped, I felt no remorse, and when his head struck the rock, I felt relief.

The blood trickled from his head and down onto the forest floor. How fitting, that he should die in the same place he murdered the ones he cared for. The whole scene seemed tranquil as I watched over it quietly. When the man who I once loved took his final breath and stopped fighting for his toxic heartbeat, the entire world stood still. With that, I was finally able to fade away, and for the second time that night, my world went black. The only difference was that this time? This time, it was forever.