I was never an adventurous kid. My sister liked to run and yell and collect pebbles as treasure from our backyard. I was content with fading away. When we were really little, I used to go out to play with her, though it was clear she enjoyed herself more than I did. She always took the lead when we played pretend, coming up with intricate stories of dragons and pirates. I enjoyed adventures more as an observer. 

On rainy days - our favorite type of days - my sister would run outside to jump and dance in the downpour. I would sit by a window, reading poetry and stories of old, knowing that they most likely came from minds most comparable to our two halves put together.. We got older and her rampant imagination began to take different forms. She started doodling often, letting her pen roam and ending up with full drawings of characters existing only in her mind. And then, she would tell me all about those characters, and I would write.

That was the beauty of our dynamic. She spoke, blurting out ideas and changing topics quickly, while I wrote. We knew each other well enough that I was able to piece together her thoughts and tie them into neat stories that I wrote in a faded composition notebook. She would smile and say, “One day, you’re going to publish those stories and we’ll be rich. Then we buy the whole forest and have adventure all for ourselves.”

When we were 1seventeen, she came up with the idea to go cryptid hunting in the forest. She said the students of our nearby random liberal arts college did it all the time, but never told anyone anything concrete about what they had found. She wasn’t content with that answer and longed to be able to discover something new. “This quest,” she mused, “of finding the cryptids of our decrepit little town, is calling to us, dear sister. It is only right that we do our part and show the truth to the world!”

We spent a week going into the forest when the sun went down. My sister tinkered with her radio to see if she could hear anything other than the expected static, while I sat up against a tree, writing about the woods and the forest floor and the stars. Writing about nothing of interest is an underrated experience. . We didn’t see much else than shadows and the expected beauty of the forest. Well, I saw the shadows, but my beloved sister was always asleep. The morning after our final night planned for cryptid hunting, she woke up, stood and walked out of the forest with my notebooks. I did not.

The shadows had whispered to me in the dead of night. They hummed songs of girls unbound and living better days. They spoke words of finding true freedom in a world of shackles. They lied, yet I still followed their voices, deeper and deeper into the overgrown woods. Those voices, dripping in honey, held me still, as mossy branches wrapped themselves around me and held tight, promising to never let me go, to never leave me behind like she did.

I was not an adventurous kid. I was the sidekick that kept a record of the adventures. Yet, I wasn’t a necessary part of the story. It would still happen without me, the only difference being that it would be a lot messier to tell others about. She claimed everything I wrote, knowing I was now no more than a ghost, lost to the forest and unable to refute her lies. And I stayed here, in this forest made of rage and familiarity, lost to time and lost to memory.