There is a feeling I get while out in the woods. The kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s watching you. It feels wrong. You move around, trying to shake off their gaze. Remove it from your skin.

I find myself out on these trails in the woods by my house, and every so often I’ll glance out of my peripherals, expecting my eyes to catch something. As my suspicions grow, so do my responses. My neck starts to twitch like it wants me to turn around. To make sure I’m alone. Whenever I stop and look off into a treeline, studying the decay and growth of the forest, my mind plays a trick. It imagines for a split second, an animal. Yet, animal sounds too domestic, too kind of a word for the things I picture. ‘Beast’ fits the conjurings my mind falls prey to.

Sometimes they’re wolves, watching me from a distant ridge. I can see the bow of their heads when they slow their pace. Stalking you with long, keen faces. Watching you with eyes which make you think their intelligence rivals your own; that out there in the woods, they would win. Sometimes it’s a bear on the pathway behind me; lumbering with a body made of muscle and hunger. Once, it was a mountain lion, shoulder blades hunched up into its back as it crouches. I know that it’s not real, but I still like to imagine.

It started when I was a kid. Some kind of goofy scare tactic. I played the game with myself for the same reason people watch horror movies: a part of me liked being scared. When I was young, I would imagine these frightening things and amp myself up. The pulse in my neck would leap faster and faster like a plucked string seconds before I would finally turn around to call my own bluff. They were products of an overactive imagination and one too many trips to the natural history museum.

These fear-fueled fantasies were child’s play, akin to a dark hallway at a friend’s house you had to navigate on your way to the bathroom. But the basis of those imaginings have grown with me as I’ve aged. I still like poking at my fears. Writing is one of the mediums that allows me to do that, and thus the reason for taking this program.