The forest you carry
It started as a mistake. The kind that rewrites you.
Five friends, one tired taxi driver, a road that turned from asphalt to dirt without warning. We were supposed to be leaving an event in Plovdiv, chasing sleep and sobriety. Instead, we were chasing a light.
The driver — a man who looked as though he had retired from logic — missed a turn, kept driving, and somehow delivered us into a forest that didn’t belong to any map. Then his phone lost signal. Then he decided to take a nap.
You can almost see it, can’t you? The absurdity of it all. Five city people, wrapped in Wi-Fi and convenience, suddenly alone with trees and silence and the smell of wet earth. That’s where the story should have ended: with us sitting awkwardly in the dark, waiting for the engine to restart. But that’s not how forests work. They don’t let you go until you’ve learned something. Or become something.
Somewhere ahead, a flicker of light pulsed like a heartbeat.
Of course, we followed it.
We found the ghost first. Every forest has one, but this one had a story.
This one was a mason — a Roman craftsman who, legend said, built his own tomb and then couldn’t leave it. He was still angry about it. Or sad. It’s hard to tell with ghosts. He kept repeating a single phrase: “Why did I eat the cake?”
The cake, we later learned, was poisoned. By his own hand. On purpose or accident, no one knows.
From the underbrush came chickens with glowing eyes, and behind them, a pig holding a cigarette and a cup of coffee. The pig looked bored, the way philosophers do when the world refuses to surprise them. The way Bulgarians look when foreigners ask if communism was “really that bad.”
“Wrong tourists,” he said, exhaling smoke that smelled like rosemary and regret. And that was it. The clowns that had begun to crawl out of the soil sank back into it. The chickens dispersed. The ghost sighed himself into nothing.
Later, when we stumbled back into the taxi, the driver was still snoring. We shook him awake. He blinked, yawned, and muttered, “Forest bad. Always dream of pigs smoking.” Then he started the car.
At first, we laughed. But later — hours, days, months later — the laughter turned into something else. It curdled into recognition, then hardened into understanding. Because the story, ridiculous as it was, stayed with me. It moved into my apartment, made coffee in the morning, looked at me in mirrors. And like most absurd things, it was trying to tell me the truth.
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(Photo: Aric Dromi Jankov)
