[ WP ] Tell a known story from a different perspective , with lighting shifting the mood/tone from how it normally is told .

I wake up in a bed of grass and leaves. Hard roots discomfort the left side of my right arm and the bottom of the back of my head. My feet hurt, my legs itch, my chest is bare. I am a man. I feel that I am a man. My eyes are closed. I open them. White light fills my vision. It fades into a clouded ceiling of branches and more leaves and rays of sunshine peeking in between them. I feel hair on the sides of my cheeks. I have hair, a lot of hair. And a full beard. It is scruffy and hot. I am sweating. The grass pricks my bare skin. I press my palms down onto the ground. A stick pokes my left hand. I wince. 
 
 I look to the left. A tree. A tree is behind me. I am laying underneath it, feeding like one of its many roots. I sit up and scoot back, scratching my right leg on another stick in the process. The bark is course but steady. I have created a makeshift seat. I look down. My legs are bare too. I am wholly bare save for a protective layer of cloth covering my midsection. I wiggle my toes. Everything works, prim and proper. My vision completely clears, no foggy peripherals, and I start to hear. 
 
 Bugs, insects, crickets. They chirp all around me. It is an equally beautiful and intolerable sound. A pain shoots through the back of my head and the top of my nose. It pulses. I have a headache, a migraine, an even more intolerable migraine. I close my eyes in pain. I hear more. The whistle of the wind, the shuffle of the trees, the chirps of the birds. I hear everything around me. My migraine subsides. I open my eyes again. I see more trees. To the left and to the right, as far as my vision takes me. I am in a forest. 
 
 I see no movement. No animals, no dramatic shifts of light. I see the changing of the light from the ever-swaying tops of the trees, but no movement on the ground. I am alone. I carefully stand up, bracing my weight on the side of the trunk as I shuffle my sensitive feet closer and closer to its large base. I am stiff. My muscles ache. I stretch my arms in an effort to relief some of their discomfort. It works. I do the same for my legs, repeating the process after thirty seconds. I am now limber, ready to take on the world. 
 
 But what is the world? I do not know. I do not know anything. I am alone, alone in a forest in a place I do not know, wholly bare save for a protective layer of cloth covering my midsection. This is no way to be. I am a man, I feel it. And I live in the world. I do not know what the world is, whatever the world means, or what kind of a man I am, whatever that means. I do not know my name, where I ’ m from, who I ’ m from, or whatever kind of place they live in. I do not know who I love. I do not know who I hate. I just do not know. 
 
 Something whistles in from behind my head and goes screaming past me, landing several feet in front of the tree. It startles me. I look at what it is. A stick. Someone threw a stick at me. Someone else is here. I am not alone. I hear footsteps running towards my general direction. They get closer, louder. I look to my right, the side of the tree where the stick came from. A person comes running across my field of vision. A smaller person. A boy. He is like a little me. He wears the same fabric as me. He has the same hair as me. Long, brown. He has the same skin as me. He turns around. He has the same face as me, or what I imagine my face would look like. 
 
 He looks at me. He picks up the stick and we look at each other. 
 
 “ Father? ” he says in a language I do not understand. 
 
 We continue to look at each other. He stares into my eyes, heavily. He walks toward me. I stay against the tree, confused by his actions and worried about my safety. He stands beneath me, looking at my face. 
 
 “ You are not my father. ” 
 
 He taps me in my side with his stick. It was not painful. I look at him curiously. 
 
 “ Who are you? ” he says, still in a language I do not understand. 
 
 I move my hand to touch his cheek. I poke him. He is warm, fleshy. He is a little version of me. 
 
 “ I do not know, ” I say in a language I do not understand. 
 
 He smiles. 
 
 “ Well, I do not know either. ” He pauses. “ But you are funny. Here, come with me. ” 
 
 He walks off. I take a step away from the tree. It is slightly… sad. This place is all I have ever known. This tree, this house that I have awoken to, is all I have to my name. But I have no name. It is a perplexing feeling. 
 
 The boy has not stopped to allow me to contemplate my existence. He has scurried off. I am forced to say goodbye. 
 
 “ Goodbye, ” I whisper. 
 
 I take step after step away from this place. I walk. He walks in front of me. I walk faster to catch up to him. We settle into a steady rhythm. My feet hurt from the leaves and sticks we walk over, each bump in our invisible path causing a pinpoint of discomfort in my course but sensitive heels. He turns back to look at me. A smile is plastered across his tiny face. I smile back at him. It is funny, the way I feel about him. We have no relation. I have just met him. But 
 
 the warmth that resonates between us, the warmth that keeps me on this track behind him, is special. More special than the warmth I felt from the tree. 
 
 He begins laughing and picks up speed. He starts to run. I am still walking. The distance between us grows. He is leaving my field of vision. I decide to start running too. It is fun. Despite the inconvenient pains from the terrain beneath my feet, I am having fun. I run faster, catching up to the little me. He laughs some more. I laugh too. We continue this way for several hundred yards. 
 
 The trees start to get thinner. The sticks and rocks disappear. We run into a field, a grassy field. The terrain gets steeper. My legs are starting to get tired. 
 
 `` Where are we running?'' I say loudly. I still do not know what I speak, but I speak it. 
 
 He does not answer. He keeps running. I realize that we are running on a hill. He slows down to a stop at the top. I slow down too, and walk carefully up behind him. 
 
 `` This is home,'' he says. 
 
 I look across the landscape. It is so beautiful. The hill we are standing on is the largest I can see. Beyond it lies a sea of grass and trees and a small river running across the middle. There are houses, people, living there. In between the trees and the smaller hills, straddling the river on its far side, is a village. Other people are there, living like me. I must meet them. I must see who they are. 
 
 `` Come,'' the boy says. 
 
 *** 
 
 This is a project I canned a long time ago. It was pretty inspired by Rip Van Winkle, which is why I posted it here after making a couple changes. I stopped writing it because I lost the taste for the first person/present tense and the weird simple language to complicated thought transition. It freaked me out reading this guy's basic, basic mind. 
 
 For real though, it's just freaky.
