Growing Up

Certain experiences mark the beginning of maturity.Dark and alone, in the beginning, until one is born and life begins, it starts out with baby steps, literally, until eventually the child is independent, physically at least, but it takes more to properly develop a mind that just a good upbringing. For a mind to properly develop the person needs experience, needs too experience more things that can be written in sentence, in any paragraph, in any essay, but it is easy to show these experiences, if only a few, and so, in this story, a story of how a certain experience helps to properly mature a certain person, one such experience will be described. This starts out the same as true beginning of every story though, with darkness. A single boy, because that is all he could possibly be thought as at the moment, cowers in the middle of a forest. With the wind howling and the sky staring intently on the boy, he begins to search, for options, and for salvation. The boy's name is Gregory, and he is a would-be hermit who had to many chocolate bars when he was younger, a boy who fled from his home due to trouble, the trouble being irrelevant, family or otherwise, all that matters is Greg, alone in an alien place he has never before been and how he is going to survive. Greg trudges through the forest, jumping at the slightest sound as the trees surround him and breath in the wind, their branches forming brittle rib cages, their creaking and aching the life of the forest. With every step another option presents itself, no better, than the last, should he run? Should he Hide? Should he stay? Should he return? None are appealing but they are no better than any other. Greg tries to run, but he realizes that he is only more tired, and more lost. Greg tries to hide, but the only place to hide are the trees and they seem to threaten to rip him apart if he comes to close. He decides that the only option is to stay, where he is, where he is alone, where it is dark.
Suddenly the light bursts through his shut eyelids, Greg gets up realizing he had fallen asleep when he laid down. He had cried before he went to sleep and the dampness still remained, if only barely, on his cheeks. The forest was not any more hospitable in the daytime, and it seemed now as if the trees had faces to accompany the slight movement they got from the slight gusts of wind. Greg didn't want to go back, but he could not stay, he decided. He did not know where he could go, and realized that now that he was alone all he wanted was to go back to those that he still care about, at the very least. Greg tried to return now, his only other option that he wanted to try, but realized that he was hopelessly lost. Greg fall back into a tree, ignoring the branches that seemed to grasp at him, ignoring the continuing chill that seemed to be building inside him, ignoring the taste of bitter hunger in his mouth, and simply fell back unwilling to want to go any farther. He sat back for what seemed to be hours simply wallowing in self pity, until suddenly a smell came. The smell seemed to permeate from somewhere, the smell stuck to him, it grappled itself into his nose, and he seemed to float towards it. Despite being only one day out from everything, he still felt the sharp pains in his stomach, his stomach demanding sustenance.
He followed the smell for an insurmountable amount of time, far to long in the mind of Greg until he found himself at a ring of trees. He saw 4 very dirty men sitting around a fire with a pot in the fire, the source of the maddening smell. The men talked, but Greg could not hear, his skin began to crawl, a shudder went up his spine, and the smell of the food seemed to be replaced by a sense of wrongness emanating from the men. Greg decided running home would be for the best and began to creep away, the freshly fallen leaves covering his exit as he tipped toed over them. The sound of a breaking branch made time freeze, for Greg, for the 4 men, for the forest, for everything. What happened next was could only be described as desperation, as that is all is shown. Greg ran. He ran faster than he had ever ran before and he did not stop because he feared what would happen. The men ran faster. They ran after him as if he was the only thing they had ever been aware of. It went on for what seemed an eternity, every second equating to a year. In the end the men caught him, took him down with a net, its tight constraining grip folding over Greg as if it were the embrace of Death himself, until suddenly everything went black after a sharp flash of pain.
Greg woke up in his home, wrapped inside his bed's blankets. Apparently the men were simply hunters who had gotten lost due to their own ineptitude, but the run had brought all of them close enough to the road that they could hear cars. Greg had smashed his had on a rock when the net hit him. Greg spent the rest of his life looking back on the experience, at the age of 43 he finally got the awareness and experience that his mind had craved for endless years. Greg had finally managed to obtain maturity, not through school, not through family, but through an experience that is something that he could always look back on and realize that not everything is perfect, but it is usually better than living in a forest for the rest of your life.